The remarkable day Ray Winstone worked with both of his heroes in the same movie: “Proper men”
It’s easy to write Ray Winstone off as that silly bloke with the overly gruff voice, but he is undoubtedly a legend.
Despite often being pigeonholed into the same roles over and over again, his CV is surprisingly varied, containing blockbusters, indie dramas, comedies, animations, and even the odd musical, which goes to show that you should never judge a book by its cover, even if that book is threatening to punch you in the face.
Across his long and multifaceted career, Winstone has been a part of the cast of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, teaming up with Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, and Leonardo DiCaprio, and has also worked alongside Jack Nicholson, although he’d be the first to tell you that wasn’t all it had cracked up to be.
On both sides of the Atlantic and on productions big and small, naughty Uncle Ray has plenty of stories to tell about Hollywood’s finest, but one film in particular afforded him the opportunity to tick not one, but two names off his bucket list. Speaking with the Shortlist, Winstone recalled working on the 2001 drama Last Orders, where he was cast as the son of a character played by the great Michael Caine, and while the two British icons had never met before, the elder statesman went out of his way to endear himself to his onscreen tyke.
“He said to me, ‘Now, Raymond. I know you’re probably nervous, working with me. But don’t worry, son, I’ll look after you’,” he reminisced. “He was good as gold. He was lovely. And then I find out Bob Hoskins is in it. Bob, I was lucky to work with on three or four occasions, once as a director as well”.
“I can’t tell you what a ball I had with these guys. Proper men. I loved them all.”
Ray Winstone
Based on the Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name, Last Orders is a nakedly emotional story about the last wish of a dead working-class man Jack Dodds, played by Caine, and it’s up to one of his oldest friends, played by Hoskins, the estranged son, and a collection of other men who were touched by his life to scatter his ashes into the sea.
On paper, this sounds schmaltzy, almost formulaic and both of those complaints are fair, but the combined talent of the acting ensemble, which also includes Tom Courtenay and Helen Mirren, and the strength of the writing endeared it to a lot of viewers.
Winstone, Caine, and Hoskins are all very much cut from the same cloth, and though Hoskins was born in Suffolk, all three men grew up in London, the city that would come to define all of their careers over the next several decades. Each star would make their name playing ordinary Londoners, often with a ‘tough guy’ sheen and turning in standout performances as no-nonsense gangsters in films that are still held up as premium examples of the format.
This was the one and only time this trio of British legends ever shared the screen before Hoskins passed away in 2014, and regardless of what you think of the actual film, the fact that it gave us this fascinating cross-section more than justifies its existence.
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