Meet Ray Winstone's daughter Lois

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.

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.'