Vinnie Jones was called a lot of things in his footballing career – a thug, a bully, an enforcer, a crusher, the dirtiest player at the league’s dirtiest club.

No one ever called him a gentleman, especially not Paul Gascoigne, who was famously photographed getting the worst of an encounter with the Wimbledon midfield enforcer in 1988.

Jostling Gazza before a free kick, Jones reached down and, using a technique he later claimed to have learned in an under-12s squad, grabbed his crotch – hard. The referee didn’t see it but, as Gascoigne doubled over, veteran sports snapper Monte Fresco did.

That was the year Jones won the FA Cup with the team dubbed the Crazy Gang. None of the opposition players he fouled, threatened and steamrollered could ever have believed that four decades later, this professional lout would be one of Britain’s most successful and respected actors.

But as director Guy Ritchie’s gangster romp The Gentlemen tops Netflix charts worldwide – taking the No 1 spot everywhere from Austria and Australia to the UK and Ukraine – it is Vinnie Jones whose performance is drawing the most praise.

Fellow hardman Ray Winstone delivers a larger-than-life performance as a drugs baron in jail. Hugh Bonneville is seedily hilarious as a pervy peer and Theo James makes a dashing criminal aristocrat. But the real glory belongs to Jones who, as the gamekeeper and occasional hitman Geoff, brings a dash of vulnerability and humility to his role.

Amid the cartoon violence and among a gallery of rascals, he is the real Gentleman.

There’s even a frisson of sexual attraction in his attentive affection for the lady of the manor, Lady Sabrina, played by Joely Richardson.

As she’s the actress who came to fame in the 1993 version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (opposite another tender hardman, Sean Bean), if the dowager duchess does tumble for Geoff, it won’t be the first time she’s bedded a gamekeeper on screen.

The gulf between First Division football (as it then was) and A-list television might seem unbridgeable, but a closer examination of Jones’s career reveals how his persona on the field – and his frequent violence off it – made the transition possible.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, his penchant for fights was so notorious that many people expected his footballing days to end in prison.

In 1995, after a riot in Dublin forced the cancellation of an Ireland-England game, he attacked a Fleet Street reporter in a pub and sank his teeth into his nose. ‘Vinnie Jones Bites Newsman’ read the Daily Mail’s headline.

Jones said he was so ashamed of his behaviour, he contemplated suicide. But three years later, he was charged with assault and criminal damage after a row with a neighbour turned violent. Jones believed the man, a 27-year-old riding instructor named Timothy Gear, damaged a stile on his farm.

‘He told me if he was to catch me riding up there,’ Gear told the court, ‘he would shoot the horse and if I was in the way he would shoot me too.’

Hammering on the door of Gear’s mobile home, Jones smashed a window and, when his victim opened the door, punched him in the face, pushed him backwards into his bedroom and sank his teeth into his scalp. Incidents like that earned Jones the nickname of ‘The Human Rottweiler’.

He admitted his seething anger was due in part to heavy drinking but also blamed his parents’ break-up. Born in a bedsit in Watford in 1965, he grew up a keen footballer until he went off the rails aged 14, after his mum and dad split. His father, Peter, a builder and gamekeeper, began bringing women home. ‘It made me so angry. Without my mum, there were no boundaries, so I just rebelled.’

He left home aged 16 after a row and found work as a groundsman at a public school in Hertfordshire. Marking out the lines on the pitch, he used to pray to his dead grandfather to help him make a career in football.

His prayers were answered when the manager of non-league Wealdstone FC, whose players trained on the school pitch, invited him to join in a game. That led to a place in the squad, before Wealdstone sold him, aged 21, for £10,000 to Wimbledon.

‘I was older than most so I knew I had to work harder,’ he said. ‘My life up until then had been such a struggle that when I got the chance, I made my mind up I wouldn’t fail.

‘Playing football gave me some self-respect. Without it, I’m sure I would have ended up in and out of prison.’

He revelled in his reputation as a bovver boy, putting his name and his voiceover to a video celebrating football’s nastiest fouls… and telling young players how to get away with them. The FA fined him £20,000 for that.

His gift for banter and a well-turned taunt earned him more celebrity. When Gary Lineker dismissed him as a ‘self-hyped personality’, Jones sneered that the England striker possessed ‘the charisma of a jellyfish’.

American ballerina Cynthia Harvey gushed to a showbiz reporter that Vinnie was nothing like his public image: ‘He is one of the most loyal, sensitive and generous men I have ever met.’

‘I can’t think why she said that,’ Jones retorted. ‘I only slept with her once.’

All that made him a natural candidate for a supporting role in Guy Ritchie’s low-budget breakthrough film, Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. This 1998 heist movie launched the career of Jason Statham and also featured Jason Flemyng, Nick Moran and Steven Mackintosh.

But it was Jones who became the emblematic face of the movie, with the two shotguns of the title slung over his shoulders and behind his head – like a living skull-and-crossbones.

Jones played debt collector Big Chris, a devoted dad who, in the film’s most violent scene, murders a gang rival by slamming his head repeatedly in a car door.

He went on to star in another Ritchie hit, Snatch, which starred Brad Pitt. American audiences hailed him in movies such as the car chase spectacular Gone In 60 Seconds, and as Juggernaut in X-Men: The Last Stand. Later this year, he co-stars with Statham in Viva La Madness, also directed by Ritchie.

To the casual eye, it might seem he has simply swapped football thuggery for Hollywood violence. But the real secret of his success lies in the contradiction between his brutishness and chivalry.

In November 2019, Jones made headlines when a diner at the Centurion Club golf club in St Albans began choking and collapsed. While other bystanders froze in panic, Jones – who is an ambassador for the club to this day – rushed over to administer CPR before paramedics arrived.

Meanwhile, his personal life has been notable for both romance and tragedy. When he married his former childhood sweetheart Tanya in 1994, he described falling in love with her as ‘like being hit by Mike Tyson’.

She had a daughter, Kaley, by a previous marriage, whom Jones adopted (he also has a son, Aaron, from an earlier relationship). When Kaley was born, Tanya suffered heart failure and later had a heart transplant.

After decades of fragile health, including cervical and skin cancer, she died aged 53, seven years ago. Jones is now in a relationship with producer Emma Ford.

‘He’s not this big, tough character like everyone thinks,’ Tanya once said. ‘He has a naivety that people outside aren’t aware of. He is so gentle, so loving, and when he loves you, you’re the centre of his world. He puts you on a pedestal.’

In other words, unlikely though it always seemed, Vinnie Jones is the complete Gentleman.