The face is new but the mold is familiar. Squinting eyes that seem to pierce the flesh, a nose that looks like it's, seen a few haymakers, a jaw of stubborn granite.

In The Long Good Friday, Bob Hoskins is the archetypal ugly-beautiful gangster – a British Bogart, a teeth-clenching Cagney, a dapper, rugged Raft. As stocky (and cocky) as Steiger, he's both unreasonably ruthless and all too human.

Hoskins, 40, first came into the limelight in America as the head-in-the-clouds traveling music salesman in Pennies from Heaven, a British TV mini-series. Then, last fall, cockney accent and all, he played a chilling Iago to Anthony Hopkins' Othello in the BBC's Shakespeare series.

To create Good Friday's Harold Shand, a tough, terrifying thug from London's East End who's risen from the streets to the top of the underworld through wit, charm and brute force, Hoskins didn't have to dig too deep. "I've always tried to live on the streets," says the self-professed working-class actor. “It’s where I get a lot of my acting from, and it’s also a good reminder if you start getting out of touch."

Getting in touch is exactly how Hoskins, in his own way, prepared for the Shand role. He hung out with real gangsters, many of whom appeared in the film. "I learned firsthand what they were like," he says. "They were very, very heavy people.  I think there's violence in all of us, but these people were amazing. They could be really quiet. 'Hey, guys. . .'" he whispers. "Hardly any of them spoke above that level. But if anything went wrong, boom! They just exploded. And it was terrifying."

Some say Hoskins has a great capacity for violence himself. Comments Adrian Noble, who directed him in the play The Duchess of Malfi: "Obviously, Bob hasn't killed anyone or anything like that, but he has seen a great deal of violence and does know an awful lot of violent people."

Hoskins, who recently remarried after a rancorous divorce, admits that the dark and dangerous emotions he displays so explosively in his roles scare even him: "Acting sometimes unnerves me. I mean, when you have to play a psychopath like Iago and you find you can do it, it's a bit worrying."

Hoskins' training in acting was the panorama of his Jack London existence. He started out to be an accountant and was "halfway through the door when I realized I was halfway to bein' all the people I loathe." So he wandered off to the desert, living with the Bedouins, then "Planting bahnahnahs, picking bahnahnahs, packing bahnahnahs" on an Israeli kibbutz. Window-cleaner, merchant seaman and circus fire-eater are other real-life roles he's tried.

Bullnecked Hoskins - surely nobody's image of a matinee idol - claims he stumbled onto the stage, literally and figuratively. He accompanied a friend to an audition at an amateur theater, was called to read and got the part. After Othello, he broadened his repertoire, first in Pennies and lately as Arnie Cole, a third-rate vaudevillian looking to make a killing (in filmmaking), in the wacky British mini-series Flickers. Since The Long Good Friday, he's returned to villainy, singing and dancing his barrel-chested way across the London stage as Nathan Detroit, in Guys and Dolls. But Detroit is just a "little crook." Harold Shand, on the other hand, is decidedly bigtime, and Hoskins plays him larger than life on the big screen. Shand wants to create "the new London” - he's on the verge of building a vast entertainment complex down by the docks when things start to go wrong. His Rolls is blown to bits - driver and all - outside a church (on Good Friday, naturally). A member of his gang is carved up at the swimming baths. And his favorite pub explodes just as he's about to enter.

That's when Shand explodes, mercilessly stalking his enemies and unleashing a torrent of blood that finally leaves even him revulsed.

Maybe Harold Shand is just out of his league. That's one mistake the actor Bob Hoskins won't make: He knows his roots, and he feeds on them. "The most important thing for me is the street. And I try never to lose the street, because that's where you’re coming from and that's where you're going back to."