The “proper geezer” Ray Winstone called the greatest actor of all time: “He made it real”
If someone held you at gunpoint and said the only way to secure your freedom was by correctly guessing which actor described the greatest thespian they’d ever seen as a “proper geezer,” Ray Winstone would seem like the most obvious answer. And the right one, to be fair.
There’s something to be said for living up to type, and Winstone has built a career out of it. He’s tried the odd American accent on occasion, but he’s not very good at it, even when he’s attempting to pull it off in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Best Picture’-winning The Departed.
If it looks like a geezer, acts like a geezer, and calls other people geezers, then it’s a geezer. And make no mistake; Ray Winstone is a geezer. From his breakthrough role in Scum to today, the veteran has fulfilled a very specific niche in British and international cinema; he’s not a leading man like Michael Caine was for so many years, but when you need a barrel-chested bruiser for your movie or TV show, there’s few better.
Alternating between smaller-scale pictures that allow him to stretch his dramatic chops and the big-budget blockbusters he almost always admits he’s made strictly for the money and despised every second of making, Winstone has cornered the market in bringing gruff gravitas to almost every kind of film.
He may not be the most versatile sort, but he did find one of his earliest inspirations in an all-time British great, a five-time Academy Award nominee, and the winner of a Bafta, Golden Globe, and Primetime Emmy. To him, they weren’t just a regular old geezer; they were a fucking proper one.
“Albert Finney was, you know, blinding, he was a proper geezer, you know,” Winstone informed Bafta. “And he was doing Hamlet at the time, and I used to sit and watch him do Hamlet, and he made it real. I’d see all this going on, all this palaver, and Albert Finney just actually made you want to do Shakespeare, and you understood it.”
Obviously, Winstone is not synonymous with Shakespearean drama, but when he saw Finney performing those works, he believed he could have been. “You got his emotions, which was the most important thing,” he continued. “It wasn’t just concentrating on the words, it was concentrating on what was going on in here and up here.”
When he met his idol, things got pretty weird when Susan Fleetwood, who was also appearing in the production, appeared. “She said, ‘Feel my heart’, and she lifted her tit up and put my hand on her tit,” Winstone recalled. “And I said, ‘Yeah, it feels lovely, Susan. Fantastic.'” Finney then appeared, and the two struck up a backstage conversation, which caused him to miss his cue.
Naturally, the aspiring actor legged it, went to the pub next door, hid from Finney when he turned up for a pint, only to be cornered and called a cunt. Still, it didn’t dampen his impression: “I watched him ever since, and I believe him whatever he does.”
