Tough But Tender
Caroline Roope remembers Bob Hoskins
“He is short and balding, with a thickening waistline and an accent which would make heads turn in horror at genteel gatherings,” wrote the Reading Evening Post in March 1987. Yet despite these shortcomings – or perhaps because of them – the journalist conceded that: “Bob Hoskins has proved himself to be, without doubt, the most successful British film star for generations.” The red carpets of Hollywood were vastly different from his north London beginnings but, arguably, it was his formative experiences that lent the actor his down-to-earth, tough but tender persona – qualities that served him well throughout his acting career.
Robert William Hoskins was born on 26 October 1942 in Bury St Edmonds, Suffolk, the only child of Robert Hoskins, a bookkeeper, and Elsie, a nursery school cook. Hoskins spent his childhood in Finsbury Park, north London before dropping out of school at 15 with a single O-level. He took up various odd jobs before trying an accountancy course, but he was ill-suited to a life of bookkeeping, and he failed to complete the threeyear course. As always, he was selfdeprecating about his lack of academic skills, confessing in a later interview he thought himself an “ill-educated idiot”. What he lacked in formal education, he made up for in the charisma for which he became renowned.
His early 20s were spent travelling, spending six months on a kibbutz in
Bob Hoskins received a Bafta nomination for his role as ruthless London gangster Harold Sand in The Long Good Friday.
Israel and two years with Bedouin tribes in Syria. It was following his adventures abroad that his life took an unexpected turn. “It was a million-to-one chance that led me into showbusiness,” he confessed to a reporter, “and it probably wouldn’t have happened if I’d been sober.”
It was 1968, and Hoskins had accompanied a friend to an audition being held in the bar of the Unity Theatre near Finsbury Park. He got mistaken for a candidate and was asked to read a part – Hoskins claimed he was thrust the script and told: “OK, chum – you’re next!” – and with a sense of bravado that only alcohol can provide he “trotted in”.
No one was more surprised than Bob when he was given the lead. Hoskins’ stroke of good luck and natural talent led to several years in repertory theatre before he joined the Royal Court Theatre in 1972. In 1976, he had a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company at London’s Aldwych Theatre, enjoying a successful run at the National Theatre as Nathan Detroit in its 1981 revival of Guys and Dolls. His many stage roles brought him into contact with several big-name stars of the era, including Diana Rigg in Pygmalion (1974), Patrick Stewart in The Iceman Cometh (1976) and the role of Bosola opposite Helen Mirren’s Duchess of Malfi in 1981.
Hoskins’ television break was in Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven
(1978). He played the beleaguered but optimistic sheet-music salesman Arthur Parker in the BBC series, opposite Cheryl Campbell, who played his lover Eileen. The show was critically acclaimed, despite Hoskins claiming he looked like a “little hippopotamus”. It was during this period that his private life began to unravel and his marriage to his first wife, Jane Livesey, collapsed amid claims he had been violent – something Hoskins staunchly denied throughout his life.
His other notable TV credits included Flickers with Frances de la
Tour in 1980, the role of Iago opposite Anthony Hopkins in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello in 1981, Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield (1999) with a young Daniel Radcliffe in the lead role, and the character of Badger in The Wind in the Willows (2006). In the 1980s and 1990s, Hoskins also appeared in adverts for Weetabix, British Gas and British Telecom, leading him to famously comment in 1994: “I wish I’d been able to do them years ago – then I wouldn’t’ve bothered with Shakespeare.”
Hoskins married his second wife, Linda Banwell, in 1982 and he went on to credit her with helping him survive periods of depression and the nervous breakdown that inspired him to write his play, The Bystander. Hoskins described the play with his usual levity, saying in interview that it was “about a bloke looking through a hole in the wall and talking to pot plants”.
It was Hoskins’ film roles that rocketed him to wider stardom. His 1980 film The Long Good Friday, in which he played a ruthless London gangster, earned him a Bafta nomination and the Evening Standard best actor award. Six years later he went on to win the Bafta for best actor as well as best actor at the Cannes Film Festival, a Golden Globe and a host of other prestigious awards for Mona Lisa (1986), a neo-noir crime drama in which Hoskins played an ex-convict.
Other highlights included Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984), and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987) opposite Maggie Smith. He also had a cameo in Terry Gilliam’s sci-fi dystopian movie Brazil (1985) and played a screenwriter alongside Michelle Pfeiffer in the comedy Sweet Liberty (1986), one of four films he made with his friend Michael Caine.
But arguably his highest point came in a film in which his co-star was just the blank space next to him. The surprise cinema hit of 1988, the animated actionadventure film Who Framed Roger
Rabbit saw Hoskins as bumbling private investigator Eddie Valiant playing opposite a large cartoon rabbit. The role required him to complete the acting elements first, so the animation could be added later, meaning he had to visualise where the cartoon characters were. Hoskins had to train in mime, as well as teaching himself to hallucinate the characters.
He later told former Desert Island Discs host Sue Lawley that he found himself imagining animated characters for months afterwards, quipping: “There were weasels and rabbits all over the place – I couldn’t stop it.” He then took on a range of roles – the shoe-store owner Lou Landsky in Mermaids (1990), video-game character Mario in Super Mario Bros (1993) and a serial killer in 1999’s Felicia’s Journey, as well as several cultural icons such as Benito Mussolini, Nikita Khrushchev and J Edgar Hoover.
His final credit was for his role in the fantasy film Snow White and the Huntsman in 2012, the same year he announced his retirement due to his Parkinson’s disease diagnosis. The character he played in Snow White required his face to be superimposed on another actor’s body – something Hoskins would have found humorous given his well-publicised attitude towards his unstarry looks. “I think if you’ve got a face like mine, you don’t usually wind up with the parts that Errol Flynn played, you know?” he told a journalist in 1988.
Hoskins died of pneumonia at a London hospital on 29 April 2014, at the age of 71. He was survived by his wife Linda and his four children from his two marriages. “A great actor and an even greater man,” was how Dame Helen Mirren paid tribute to the star, praising his “inimitable energy that seemed like a spectacular firework rocket just as it takes off.”
He may not have looked like leadingman material, but the actor once described as a “pink grenade” certainly knew how to set audiences alight.