Star by quirk of fate

BOB Hoskins says he’s still waiting to be found out. He hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing in this business.

“I feel I’m the wrong name on the right list,” he says. “Keep going, keep prodding, and nobody’ll notice. When I told my relations I’m gonna be an actor, they said: ‘Don’t be daft. Forget it! You’ve got to be kidding, aintcha?’”
He’s got a point. A bullfrog of a man with a boxer’s nose and a right gob on him, he’s hardly your conventional lead.
But he’s been working for 40 years now, and in that time has created some of the most memorable characters in television and film – Arthur Parker, the frustrated song-sheet salesman in TV’s Pennies from Heaven, Harold Shand, the psychotic gangster in The Long Good Friday, lovelorn George in Mona Lisa, the eye-popping private eye Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
He does hard and soft equally well. In his new film, Sparkle, he is playing one of his touching – and touched – softies.
Not surprisingly, acting wasn’t his first job – it came along by accident one evening in London in the late 1960s.
Hoskins turned up with his mate for an audition at the old trade union theatre, the Unity.
He was just there for a drink, it was his friend who wanted the part. Right, next, said the casting director, pointing to Hoskins.
Before he knew it, he found himself on the stage reading from the script of a play about a young thug. He got the lead, and that was that. He didn’t have any training or theory behind him, but he was good at pretending to be other people.
“There’s two things I love about this business. One’s acting and the other one’s getting paid for it. The rest of it is a mystery to me. But I ain’t got the faintest idea what is going on, you know. I’ve read Stanislavsky, and I thought, well, this is obvious.”
Ignorant sod that I am, I ask if he means the ‘Method’, as thesps like to call it. “Nah! Like how to look busy. It’s just looking busy, impressing the boss. Living it out and all that. Total cobblers!”
I think I know what you mean, I tell him – for example, with The Long Good Friday it’s pointless killing a few people just to get into character.
“Exactly!” he says. “I’m out the door in a flash. Gone. Let’s face it; some of the characters I’ve played you can’t take home to the wife and kids.”
Hoskins grew up in Finsbury Park in north London, his father a lorry driver, his mother a nurse. He left school at 15. Was he as hard as he seems?
“Naaaah. You don’t end up with a face like this if you’re hard, do ya? This comes from having too much mouth and nothing to back it up with. The nose has been broken so many times.”
Was he mouthy? “Oh yeah, plenty of courage. I’m the soppy sod who got up again.”
It was in the late 1970s and early 80s that he produced his most outstanding work, partly because he was more fussy with his choices, and partly because Britain was rich in writers and directors.
On television, Dennis Potter mingled genres and explored the subconscious in ways that hadn’t been seen before. Was he aware that Pennies from Heaven was special when he was making it?
“Nah. The thing was at the time the BBC were quite frightened of it. Whasisname, Piers Haggard, the director, asked me to take my clothes off – I come home, take me clothes off, put me pyjamas on and go to bed, about as sexy as a bag of Brussels sprouts.
But he says, ‘I want full frontal.’ Well, Bill Cotton (then controller of BBC1) went bananas. ‘We can’t have that,’ he says, ‘If you show Hoskins’ on the television we will get letters of complaint.’ Dennis, without a beat, says, ‘No Bill, you’ll get letters of sympathy.’ Hahahahaha!” Hoskins roars.
What happened to the golden age of TV drama? “Gawd knows. It’s all live television, isn’t it? Living television is the cheapest way to make TV and the cheaper they make it, the more money for the executives.”
Hoskins is now 64, but has no plans to retire. The thing is, he says, an actor can be in an iron lung and you can still give him a part. And now, with his age and status, he’s enjoying himself more than ever.
“You reach a point where the cameo is the governor. You go in there for a couple of weeks, you’re paid a lot of money, everybody treats you like the crown jewels, you’re in and out, and if the film’s a load of rubbish, nobody blames you, y’knowwhadimean. It’s wonderful.”
Maybe for you Bob, I say, but not always so wonderful for us. The cameos can frustrate the viewer, and unbalance a film. In Sparkle, for example, you wish he was in the film longer. He laughs off the criticism. “Always leave ‘em wanting more, son!”
He accepts there have been flops, and films he’s detested, but that’s the nature of the game. “The worst thing I ever did? Super Mario Brothers. It was a nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare.”
What does he think would have happened to him if he’d not become an actor? “Probably rob banks or something.” He pauses. “I’d probably be dead.”