PASADENA - If you were casting Panamanian dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega, a pudgy Brit with a Cockney accent as thick as a kidney pie would probably not be your first choice.

It's a natural, says Bob Hoskins, who has portrayed everything from Al Capone to a straight-man to an animated rabbit.

"A short, ugly South American kid from the ghetto?" says Hoskins. "Who else would you choose?"

Of course, for ages Hoskins has defied description. Today, dressed in dark slacks and cobalt blue shirt, he could be a bank teller or a bus driver or a bookie.

On April 2 he premieres as Noriega in Showtime's "Noriega: God's Favorite." On April 9 we'll see him as Sancho Panza on TNT's "Don Quixote" and on April 16 he plays Mr. Micawber on PBS' "David Copperfield."

No typecasting for him. But, then, Hoskins was never like other actors. He didn't, for instance, show the slightest interest in acting when he was younger.

"I was in a bar and I didn't know anybody, so I was thinking about brain surgery or being an astronaut or something like that ... A friend of mine was interested in amateur dramatics. We were going to go to a party, but we went to this amateur theater in London for him to do an audition, and I waited for him in the bar."

Hoskins had been waiting quite a while when someone approached him and said, "You're next."

He took a flier and ended up with the lead in the play. "And the first night an agent came and said, 'You've got to take this up professionally.' I said, 'Get us a job and I will.

The next three auditions found Hoskins a dutifully employed actor, and he's been one ever since.

The man who starred in such disparate movies as "The Long Good Friday," "Mona Lisa," "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," "Mermaids," "Felicia's Journey" and "Nixon" says once he found himself on stage, it was a revelation.

"The stage was the most peaceful place on Earth," he says.

"I loved it. It was wonderful. All my life - ever since I was a kid - I've painted and carved things and written poetry and stuff like that. I've always been pretty artistic, but it's pretty lonely," he says in his thick accent.

"Suddenly I got on stage and there's other people in the playground. It's a collective art form. I'm very much a gang member. I'm great in a gang."

Hoskins, 57, plays the quintessential gang member in "Noriega."

"I think what interested me about this character was that he was capable of every kind of extreme - extreme cruelty and extreme violence. And extreme tenderness at the same time ... It was great to play all those elements."

Hoskins himself is not a man of extremes. In fact he laughs when it's suggested that his multicolored characters might linger after the kleig lights dim.

"I flush," he snorts, throwing his head back.

"I walk away from it, and it's gone. I probably couldn't remember a line of anything I've done. You can't hang on to it because you've got too much to take in all the time. I'm empty headed. I'm completely empty. It's gone when I go home. You imagine, the characters I play? Can you imagine me taking them home to Linda and the kids? My bags would be at the door."

Married for 17 years to his second wife, Linda, he has two teen-age children with her, Rosa and Jack. He also has two children in their late 20s with his first wife.

The divorce from his first wife triggered a nervous collapse that almost ruined him, he says.

"I was living in a bubble. A nervous breakdown is agony," he shivers.

A friend named Verity Bargate had launched Hoskins' one-man show in London only to have him back out at the last minute.

She found him in the park talking to the ducks.

Grabbing him by the coattails she told him the ducks couldn't buy tickets, but the audience had.

"She dragged me through a full theater, into the dressing room. And I did it. It nearly killed me, but I did it. Afterwards I walked into the dressing room and there's Verity with two glasses and a bottle of champagne. 'Welcome to sanity, kid.' And the bubble had burst."

Never impaled by that panic again, Hoskins works constantly. He has filmed so many movies in America that for a while he found himself the 32nd flavor, at the top of casting lists for everything from "Mussolini" to the "Super Mario Brothers."

But he was never tempted to go Hollywood.

"It's nice when it's happening," he shrugs. "But if you got a family it's quite a relief when it starts to calm down a bit. You got kids to bring up. You can't (mess) up their lives. My first two kids, they live in England. If I lived in Hollywood I would probably never see them.

"There's also my dad. My mum died a few years ago and my dad, he lives downstairs in my house. There's no way I can turn round to my dad - who's 86 - and say, 'Dad, you're going to die in America.'"