{"id":41776,"date":"2025-08-03T21:37:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-03T21:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/41776\/"},"modified":"2025-08-03T21:37:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-03T21:37:14","slug":"the-one-movie-scene-ray-winstone-will-never-forget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/41776\/","title":{"rendered":"The one movie scene Ray Winstone will never forget"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ray<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still)<\/p>\n

Sun 3 August 2025 16:45, UK <\/p>\n

Ray Winstone <\/a>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\u2019s 1997 film Face and an abusive father in Tim Roth\u2019s The War Zone to a gang boss in Dominic Anciano\u2019s Love, Honour and Obey and a retired safecracker living in Spain in Jonathon Glazer\u2019s 2000 film Sexy Beast.<\/p>\n

In 2021, the actor brought his characters\u2019 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\u2019 celebrated 1861 novel Great Expectations.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s future. The series marked one of Winstone\u2019s first forays into historic cinema and TV shows, but his gritty persona, which he\u2019s become well known for, remained the same.<\/p>\n

Winstone\u2019s 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Starring Sir John Mills as Pip, Sir Alec Guinness as Pip\u2019s 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<\/a>, who also directed iconic films like Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia.<\/p>\n

Recounting his first experience of watching the film, Winstone said, \u201c It kind of stuck in my mind, especially the sequence at the beginning in the graveyard \u2013 it scared me. It was the kind of image that stuck with me all of my life really.\u00a0\u201cIt was the character in the film actually,\u201d he explained, \u201cthe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The actor has since reflected on why the film meant so much to him, noting, \u201cThe fact that it\u2019s 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\u2019s a hell of a lot going on in it. Maybe as a kid you don\u2019t understand, but you get it when you get older.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film is now widely regarded as one of Lean\u2019s best, and was named the 5th greatest British film of all time in the British Film Institute\u2019s Top 100 British films list of 1999.<\/p>\n

The great American film critic Leonard Maltin gave the film four out of four stars, describing it as \u201cone of the greatest films ever made, a vivid adaptation of Dickens\u2019 tale\u201d and the opening graveyard sequence as \u201ca gem\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still) Sun 3 August 2025 16:45, UK Ray Winstone knows how to play…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[243,23971,96,23972,2839,23973,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-41776","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-bbc","9":"tag-david-lean","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-great-expectations","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-ray-winstone","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}