For an actor who's spent his career playing tough guys, Ray Winstone's most unlikely chapter might be the one where he rocked a punk haircut and strutted around the streets of Vancouver over forty years ago. It was his first American film gig, 1982's "Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains," in which he played the frontman of the fictional band The Looters, flanked by Sex Pistols' Steve Jones and Paul Cook, along with The Clash's Paul Simonon.
The music drama, starring Diane Lane and Laura Dern, follows a group of teenage girls fighting to survive in the male-dominated world of punk. Winstone had to actually sing and perform live in the film, and the pressure got to him. He told NME's Alex Flood about panicking in the studio before filming even started, standing in front of a mic trying to practice: "I told my wife, I'm not a rock star, I can't do this. She said, of course you're not, you're an actor. That's when it clicked for me — funny enough, it was my wife who snapped me out of it, not the director or anyone else." Winstone had just gotten married at the time, and that marriage has now lasted 47 years.
