Ray Winstone likes a cuddle. He loves his wife. He’s proud of his daughters. Steve Pratt discovers that under the image of a “little fat geezer from the East End” there’s a big softie waiting to get out.

MINDFUL of his reputation as the hardest of screen hard guys, I wouldn’t dare describe Ray Winstone as “a little fat geezer from the East End”. But as he says the words himself – when asked how he thinks Hollywood, his sometime employer, perceives him – they bear repeating.

“I get a really good reception there,” he says.

“It’s almost like they understand me more than the industry does here. But that’s okay. That’s fine. Over there I’m just a London geezer who’s come over there.

“They do look at us English actors with a lot of respect, you know. Where over here, there’s loads of us and you get put into a bracket a little more. They’re ready to take a bit more of a chance on the parts that you would play.

“Here, you have to create the work for yourself and then it can be a little bit cruel.”

He plays another hard man in his latest film 44 Inch Chest, from the writers who penned his Sexy Beast hit. He plays a man driven to distraction by his wife’s infidelity with a French waiter. His reaction is to beat his wife, kidnap the waiter and, with the aid of friends, subject him to mental and physical torture in a dark room.

Our meeting follows similar lines – apart from the torture. We (four film writers) are shut in a dimly-lit hotel room with Winstone for 50 minutes to interrogate him on his 44 Inch Chest.

He has a producer’s credit on the film as well as leading the cast of Ian McShane (another producer), John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Dillane and Joanne Whalley.

The role of producer wasn’t one he enjoyed.

“Not really. I like what I do,” he says. “I’m an executive producer – what does that mean? It means you don’t get paid for it, basically. To be a part of it from the beginning, that’s kind of an accolade that me and Ian McShane deserve.

So that’s okay, I can live with that.

“The process of actually making the film, and turning up every day and going to work with the talent that we had was phenomenal.”

Winstone’s language in interview boasts only the occasional F-word, unlike 44 Inch Chest, whose dialogue has more F and C-words per minute than any other I’ve seen.

His own words when talking about the script and the bad language are restrained. “If you had a bunch of women there it would probably be the same thing. They’re probably worse than us. I’ve got a family full of women and I’ve heard them go off. To me, it’s like listening to Shakespeare in a way, without the five beats.

“It’s something very poetic about the way these boys write. I just wish there were more writers like them. When you hear about film scripts sometimes all you hear is that an actor strips it and strips it and strips it and it’s all visual.

That’s fantastic, that’s cinema, but it’s great to listen to the words.

“I love films like A Man For All Seasons.

Robert Bolt wrote a script that stands up today and that’s all dialogue. Okay, this is a working man’s version of A Man For All Seasons, dare I say it. It’s a film that hopefully keeps you locked in on the dialogue because, visually, there’s nowhere else to go than that room.”

The film may appear to be a gangster movie but “there’s a hell of a lot more than that”, he says. Being about a marriage breaking down, it’s difficult to keep Winstone’s wife out of the conversation. He never speaks to her about his work, although he did on War Zone “for obvious reasons” – it was about an incestuous father and daughter relationship.

“Other than that I like her to go and watch the film, then have her own mind at the end of it. So that she doesn’t know what’s coming next, you keep as much as you possibly can from her.”

He enivisages her agreeing with the sentiment expressed in the film that love is hard work. “I’ve been married 30 years,” he states.

“You have your moments and your rows and at times you can’t stand one another, but I’m a bit old-fashioned. We come from that age, where you get over that and become mates again and love one another again,” he says.

“I love a cuddle, I like all that. I like to be cuddled, there’s nothing wrong with that but it can be overbearing at the wrong time. So I kind of understand that – someone over-loving someone because you want that emotion back.”

You always knew he was just a soft-centred romantic geezer at heart, didn’t you? That’s confirmed as the conversation moves on to his daughters, Lois and Jaime.

HE’D recently seen Jaime in her first play. “I’d have thought she’d been doing it for 20 years. She’s my daughter, I’m going to say she’s very good, but she wasn’t just very good she was absolutely blinding, she really was.

“It’s fantastic and that makes you really proud. My Lois, I’ve seen her band (hip hop trio Crack Village) and she can sing. I wish I could sing because I’d have loved to have been a singer. She can do the business.

“She’s not getting much work as an actress at the moment but she’s singing and that’s what she loves. As long as they’re happy doing what they do, that’s the thing. And please God, I can retire and they can look after me.”

He may say he can’t sing but a screen musical is among future projects – playing Julius Caesar in Steven Soderberg’s Cleopatra. “It’s rock’n’roll singing with Tony Curtis haircuts.

If it goes again it will be with Catherine Zeta Jones playing Cleopatra,” he says.

“It was supposed to go this year and for whatever reason didn’t happen, probably because I was in it.”

■ 44 Inch Chest (18) opens in cinemas on Friday.