The 1983 role that got Ray Winstone arrested for murder: “Double murder, in fact”
Since the beginning of his career, Ray Winstone has been characterised as a hardman. He’s done well out of being typecast, but life almost ended up imitating art when he was arrested on a murder charge.
While the actor didn’t really settle into his groove as one of the industry’s marquee cockney wideboy until the 1990s, making his screen debut in Alan Clarke’s Scum still laid the groundwork for what was to come, with Winstone over the moon with how controversial his first foray into on-screen thespianism became.
Since he wore that role as a badge of honour, and he was very good at it, casting directors could only see him as one thing. There are several more strings to his performative bow than that, right enough, but for the most part, whenever you hear that he’s been cast in something, you generally know what you’re going to get.
Most of his credits have seen him cast as geezers, criminals, gangsters, tough guys, and stern father figures, and it’s never bothered him too much. Winstone isn’t the kind of guy who’s likely ever to find himself in the Academy Awards conversation, but if you need one of film and television’s most convincing bruisers, then he’s one of the best in the business.
In one of his earliest parts, he was cast as a character called Tully in a single episode of the nine-season British crime series, Bergerac, with his instalment airing in January 1983. On paper, it was a straightforward gig, albeit one that required him to commute from his home base of London to the show’s location on Jersey, which caused an unexpected snafu.
That might be selling things a little short, though, since Winstone revealed that he’d ended up being hauled in by the police as a suspect in a killing. “I got arrested for murder,” he revealed, years after the fact. “Double murder, in fact. Well, it was murder and attempted murder.”
The star, who was only in his mid-20s at the time, thought nothing of the way he flitted from Jersey to home, and vice versa, but the authorities had other ideas. “I was filming a part in Bergerac at the time, and I was travelling backwards and forwards from Jersey,” he explained. “But I didn’t know a gang used that route to run guns, and I got pulled.”
Not only did he accidentally use a gun-running route to get to work, but Winstone also shared that “someone identified me from a photofit,” so he must have carried at least a passing resemblance to the actual culprit. Fortunately, once the police were convinced that he hadn’t murdered somebody in cold blood, he was released and allowed to go about his business as usual.
While he didn’t divulge any details about who actually committed the crime, he did find out how the case was closed. “Eventually, they shot a man dead who they say committed the crime,” he noted, which, as it happened, wasn’t him.
