(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 3 August 2025 16:45, UK
Ray Winstone knows how to play the hard man. The Hackney-born actor has lent to the role of charismatic villain, from the small-time bank robber in Antonia Bird’s 1997 film Face and an abusive father in Tim Roth’s The War Zone to a gang boss in Dominic Anciano’s Love, Honour and Obey and a retired safecracker living in Spain in Jonathon Glazer’s 2000 film Sexy Beast.
In 2021, the actor brought his characters’ penchant for bloody punch-ups and rough-and-ready personas to the historic role of fearsome criminal and fugitive Abel Magwitch in the hit BBC Christmas special adaptation of Charles Dickens’ celebrated 1861 novel Great Expectations.
Escaped from a prison ship, Magwitch meets the young Pip on the marshes on Christmas Eve, and their encounter has far-reaching consequences on the young boy’s future. The series marked one of Winstone’s first forays into historic cinema and TV shows, but his gritty persona, which he’s become well known for, remained the same.
Winstone’s role in the BBC adaptation was a full circle moment for the actor, who revealed in an interview that it was this exact scene in the 1946 film adaptation of Dickens’ novel that has stuck with him ever since he was a child, making his call-up for the role of Magwitch in the BBC adaptation particularly resonant.
Starring Sir John Mills as Pip, Sir Alec Guinness as Pip’s friend Herbert Pocket and Jean Simmons as Estella, the film won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction, Black and White, and was nominated for Best Screenplay Adaptation, Best Picture, and Best Director for David Lean, who also directed iconic films like Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia.
Recounting his first experience of watching the film, Winstone said, “ It kind of stuck in my mind, especially the sequence at the beginning in the graveyard – it scared me. It was the kind of image that stuck with me all of my life really. “It was the character in the film actually,” he explained, “the old boy who played him, the fear you have as a kid, someone coming out of the dark, the kind of thing you have nightmares about.”
The actor has since reflected on why the film meant so much to him, noting, “The fact that it’s about where we come from, the inverted snobbery of people from other worlds, and what love is, and how love can be so cold. There’s a hell of a lot going on in it. Maybe as a kid you don’t understand, but you get it when you get older.”
The film is now widely regarded as one of Lean’s best, and was named the 5th greatest British film of all time in the British Film Institute’s Top 100 British films list of 1999.
The great American film critic Leonard Maltin gave the film four out of four stars, describing it as “one of the greatest films ever made, a vivid adaptation of Dickens’ tale” and the opening graveyard sequence as “a gem”.
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