Lydia Slater. Photographer|Nicky Emmerson. Stylist|Nicky Yates5 April 2012
Jacket, £605, Dries Van Noten at Selfridges (0800 123 400). Dress, £370, ChloÈ at Selfridges (0800 123 400). Tights, £18, Wolford (020 7529 3000). Suede ankle boots, £575, Jimmy Choo (020 7493 5858). Necklace, £290, Kabiri (020 7224 1808)
There is tiny, crop-headed actress Jaime, escorted everywhere by the equally petite Alfie Allen (whose sister Lily is another strangely lucky recipient of celebrity genes). And there is statuesque, tousled actress Lois, 26, Jaime's elder sister, whom I am meeting today. Even not looking her best - she's just recovered from a bout of flu and has come down with cold sores, her eyes are red-rimmed and her tumbling chestnut mane is tied up, Bet Lynch-style, in her little sister's leopard-spotted hairband - Lois could stop traffic.
She teeters in on vertiginous suede bondage style heels; her legs are encased in skintight black jeans and great ropes of black beads dangle around her neck. Her features are sultry and feline, and her lush pout even won the admiration of the equally well-endowed Angelina Jolie. In the loos at Robert Carlyle's wedding, Angelina told Lois her mouth was beautiful and insisted on adorning it with her own scarlet lippie. 'Ever since then, I've been whacking out the red lipstick,' cackles Lois. 'She's a beautiful girl, Angelina. She's just so down-to-earth; a lovely, classy lady who's used her looks in the right way to make the world better.' So saying, she heads into the kitchen, plonks herself in a chair and her slanting, greeny-brown eyes suddenly and disconcertingly swim with tears. 'My grandad [her mother's father] died two weeks ago,' she explains in a whisper. 'He was a great man. He was a very hard grafter. He made models of planes and used to take me and Jaime to fly them. At the funeral, we had a big plane made of flowers on the car.' Her voice wobbles out of control.
Lois wears dress, £320, See by Chloe at www.my-wardrobe.com. Hair by Kevin Ford at Naked using Paul Mitchell and Corioliss. Make-up by Liberty Shaw using Sisley. Fashion assistant: Orsolya Szabo
The Winstones, as it is perhaps unnecessary to point out, are unfashionably close, in that all-for-one, one-for-all Cockney spirit that I thought was confined to the (purely fictional) Larkins. One might call the Winstones a modern Stone Age family, in fact. 'Yeah, we're pretty old-school,' confirms Lois. So she and Jaime, although sharing the same red carpet and going up for similar Brit flick roles, rarely have a bad word to say to - or about - one another. 'Of course we drive each other mad,' says Lois. 'Mostly about clothes - we've got too many clothes and not enough space. But I'm so proud of her, she's doing so well. Rivalry? Never. There's no rivalry between us.'
She says Jaime's boyfriend Alfie is 'a very, very talented boy', although she's a bit tight-lipped on the subject of his sister Lily (who fell out with Jaime earlier in the year after apparently accusing her of taking over her friends). 'I don't really know the lady,' she says primly. As for tabloid reports that Jaime 'bullies' little Alf: 'It's the biggest load of bollocks,' Lois snarls. 'Of course they row a bit, like any couple, but they're really in love and it's beautiful.'
Lois herself is newly single, having just split up with her fashion photographer boyfriend Stepan Zilla ('he's still my soulmate but I don't need a man in my life at the moment'), but says she hopes one day to be as happily married as her parents. Theirs is a pretty hard act to follow, since Ray and Elaine have been together for 30 years. When Elaine gave birth to a 'second honeymoon' baby, Ellie Rae, seven years ago, Jaime and Lois cut the umbilical cord together. 'We heard my mum scream, and we came running in as the baby came out,' Lois says. 'Things like that really make you realise what life's about.'
It's no surprise, then, that the Winstones positively revel in sharing the screen en famille. Ray has been in three of Lois's five films to date. Indeed, she has just wrapped on Fathers of Girls, in which she plays a heroin addict, and Ray Winstone her worried parent. Actually, this film sounds more like parental therapy than anything else. 'It was just something my dad and Karl [Howman, the director, whom she calls 'Uncle Karl'] really needed to do,' explains Lois, who stars in it alongside Howman's actress daughter Chloe. 'When we were growing up, our dads were so worried. We went out and experimented, and there was nothing they could do about it. That was what they wanted to portray.
'I've never been in the situation of those kind of drugs,' she goes on hastily, 'but I understand addiction, I've seen it and I've educated myself.'
Lois wears jacket, £360, Moschino at Selfridges (0800 123 400). Top, £488, Sophia Kokosalaki at Matches (0870 067 8838). Sequined leggings, £1,045, Alexander McQueen at Selfridges (0800 123 400).
Scum
Quadrophenia,
Minder
Birds of a Feather
They lived in a two-bedroom council flat in Enfield and attended a tough local school. 'But we were rich in our hearts,' she says soppily. 'My parents always had a bit of class, always. They never gave up on each other. They never gave up on us. They kept fighting and as many people put my dad down and told him he couldn't act, or wouldn't take him seriously because he's a Cockney, he just kept going.'
At the age of four, Lois decided to be an actor, too, when she visited her father on the set of Robin of Sherwood, in which he played Will Scarlet. Her career started in her teens, when she was an extra on Nil By Mouth, the film which shot Ray up the ladder to fame and fortune, leading as it did to major roles in Sexy Beast and Cold Mountain. He moved his family out of Enfield and into comfortably rural Roydon, Essex, to a large house with sheep and its own bar (Raymondo's) in the garden.
Meanwhile Lois rebelled, in a properly teenage way, dyeing her hair red, piercing her lip, nose and tongue, and going to squat raves. 'I didn't like the showbiz world at first,' she explains. 'I wanted to line them up against the wall and shoot them. I found it all a bit pretentious and fake. What I wanted was to meet real people of all cultures and backgrounds.' It is probably this period that her father is attempting to exorcise in Fathers of Girls, but Lois refuses to feel guilty about it. 'I look back now and think I was just being free,' she says.
After giving up an art course and the Artists Theatre School in Ealing, she headed for Manchester, where she stayed for three years, DJing and organising parties. 'My mum and dad used to just ring me up, going, "Come home!"' she says. 'But I was being very creative up there. I met some amazing people and I met some scumbags, too. I didn't think I was going off the rails, I thought I was perfectly fine. It was just that everything else was mundane and boring.'
Lois wears dress, £679, Jasmine di Milo (www.jasminedimilo.com). Tights, £4.99, Jonathan Aston (0127 723 2301)
Last Orders,
Everything,
Anyway, she's now got a film in the pipeline that has nothing whatsoever to do with Ray Winstone. The Rapture stars Stephen Fry, and Lois plays a squat-dwelling anarchist who, in her words, 'steals the spirit of destiny that killed Christ on the cross, to prevent the government from cloning him'. Hmm. Let's hope it plays better than it reads.
Even this sounds a whole heap more credible than another film that she's recently been linked to: Final Run, starring Gazza, the weeping footballer. 'That's an absolute lie,' she declares furiously. 'I don't know where my name came into that. I think it was a money-making thing from a load of con artists.' So incensed was she by this rumour that she actually barrelled down to the West London studio to sort it out. 'I said, "Apparently I'm in this film. Do you have a script? What's going on, who's in it?" They told me Gazza was in it - so I put my middle finger up and said, "Don't use my name again because my dad'll be coming down to see ya." ' Clearly a chip off the tough old block.
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