"I THOUGHT, YEAH . . . BOSH, I'll have some of that, please.  Lovely!'' 

Bob Hoskins is talking about the glamour and glitter of being - becoming, finally - a star. He is enjoying himself. ''No, it's great, isn't it? . . . Bruce Oldfield dress for the wife . . . . Bosh. . . . Sitting in a private jet with Steven Spielberg. . . . Wonderful stuff!'' Hoskins' enthusiasm seems genuine; his delight in the treats that fame brings appears natural and ingenuous. His eyes widen.

''Bosh,'' according to my dictionary, means ''foolish talk,'' from the Turkish word for empty. Hoskins uses it as a catchall exclamation. ''You're there - bosh - then he comes in and sits opposite you -bosh.'' I've never heard it used this way before. Demotic London talk, of the sort Hoskins employs, is full of such phrases - ''Know what I mean?'' ''Innit?'' ''Right,'' ''Got it'' and so on - but ''bosh'' is a new one on me. Perhaps it'll catch on.

Hoskins has ousted Michael Caine from the role of Britain's favorite Londoner, and such is his renown these days and such is the currency of London, or, rather, Cockney slang that ''Bosh'' could soon be on all our lips.

Hoskins is a small, powerful man, around 5 feet 6 inches tall, I would guess. He once would have been described as thickset, but he's heftier these days. He has a wide, oblate face and a chunky dense presence of the sort associated with wrestlers or weight lifters. But like a lot of other small powerful men, he's surprisingly light and dainty on his feet, as anyone who saw him play Nathan Detroit in the celebrated National Theater production of ''Guys and Dolls'' will testify.

He has been going at an extraordinary pace: by the end of this year, he will have starred in four feature films and directed one of them. When I met him, he was acting in a film, ''The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,'' set in Dublin in the 1950's and scheduled to open in New York on Dec. 23.

Hoskins' character, uncultured and flashy, returns to Dublin after 30 years in America. The actor had grown a pencil-thin mustache that didn't really suit him. It looked a little pretentious and dandified, hinted at notions of personal vanity that are in reality entirely absent from Hoskins' nature. He enjoys his food and drink - ''I have all the vices'' - he smokes and clearly doesn't give any thought to his waistline. His hair is quite thin now and he refers to himself with a laugh as a ''baldy.'' He appears unaffected and very much his own man. His voice is husky and he has a strong Cockney, or London, accent, replete with the familiar nasal twang and glottal stops.

There is very much a sense of ''you take me as you find me'' about him. First impressions are of candor and openness, with none of the guarded and entirely formal amiability common to those who have given too many interviews.

He is, and he is the first to admit it, an unlikely addition to that tiny category, the British film star. He possesses the same straightforwardness as Michael Caine and Sean Connery, but they began their careers as handsome leading men. Hoskins is a character actor turned film star - an altogether different proposition. Hoskins himself doesn't see anything too unusual in this progression. He considers the last two decades' obsession with looks and prototypical male beauty as something of an aberration. He cites James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson as his precursors, and contends that no one minded in the slightest that these film stars weren't ideally handsome. It's a fair point.

THE COMPARISON HAS another validity in that Hoskins has, in the eyes of the general public in Britain, made his name playing villains. His first big film role was as a mob chief in the thriller ''The Long Good Friday.'' That was seven years ago, but it is astonishing how, when Hoskins' name is mentioned, it's ''The Long Good Friday'' that people first recall. The success of last year's ''Mona Lisa,'' in which he played an ex-convict, served to underline his penchant for gangster roles. Hoskins is everybody's choice as a charismatic heavy or lovelorn thug, and he recognizes the risks of being typecast - risks that the work he has done this year will go some way to dissipate.

But there is another side to Hoskins' talent that is not so familiar but in my view is far more impressive. He has an ability to play the ordinary man - l'homme moyen sensuel -with a kind of tender veracity that is unrivaled. This was present in ''Mona Lisa'' - the smalltime hoodlum falls for the prostitute he is hired to chauffeur - and indeed that quality of humdrum romance tends to lurk in all his performances.

It was most effectively enshrined in a dramatic series he did on BBC Television called ''Pennies From Heaven'' - highly successful and controversial - and, although Hoskins doesn't like to attach too much importance to it, the series can properly be regarded as the breakthrough in his career (Hoskins insists that a lot of the work he did after ''Pennies From Heaven'' - including ''The Long Good Friday'' - had been set up before ''Pennies'' was broadcast). ''Pennies'' was written for television by Dennis Potter and was later filmed in a more pallid version, which Steve Martin couldn't save. Like all of Potter's other work, it caused something of a sensation, not least because the characters would break off during the drama to mime popular songs of the 1930's and 40's.

''Pennies From Heaven'' was shown almost 10 years ago, but I and quite a few more can recall it very vividly, not so much because of its audacious technique, but because of Hoskins in the role of the hero, Arthur Parker, a music publisher's traveling salesman whose attitude to life is shaped by the lyrics of the songs he sells. As the ''Pennies'' segments followed one another on television, the drama allowed Hoskins to illustrate a rich range of emotions - carnality, innocence, guile and trepidation - all filtered through his persona of gritty ordinariness, or potent banality. It's in this area that Hoskins' real and remarkable strengths lie, but they are not the ones for which he is primarily celebrated by the public at large.

IN THE LAST FOUR OR FIVE years, we have seen in Britain a revival of what might be termed ''the Cockney myth,'' and Hoskins is one of its key exemplars. I say Cockney, but what we're talking about is the working-class Londoner, such as might be found in the capital's East End. One of the first things Hoskins said to me was, ''I come from the street.''

The stereotype is a sharp, canny, streetwise male. He has a well developed ironic sense of humor and a glib line of patter that is dressed up in its own argot (the best-known feature of this being Cockney rhyming slang -for example, ''He's brown bread'' means ''He's dead''). Typically, he treads a dubious line between honesty and criminality and has a healthy adversarial relationship with the police (''filth'').

You can trace this character back to Dickens's Artful Dodger, but recent years in Britain have seen an astonishing resurgence of the Londoner as Britain's key proletarian role model. Hugely successful television programs have been built around this notion and this type of character.

The most popular television soap opera - with an audience of 18 million, vast for Britain - is called ''EastEnders,'' and PBS will start showing it in this country in January. There is a type of raucous singalong pop music known as ''Rockney.'' Cockney ''rap'' music has made it onto the charts. A recent advertisement went ''Milk's Gotta Lotta Bottle'' - ''bottle'' being a cockney slang word almost impossible to translate (roughly: ''courage,'' ''nerve,'' ''get-up-and-go'' But then you can also ''bottle out'' - akin to ''chicken out''). The Cockney, the quintessential Londoner, now occupies a far larger role in the British folk culture - the country's zeitgeist - than ever before.

HOSKINS HAS BENEFITED from this, as indeed have a lot of younger actors. There is now a distinct school of London actors. Not long ago, their accents would have been a real career impediment; now they're a positive asset. In this regard, it's interesting to compare the careers of Hoskins and Michael Caine. Caine's accent is only marginally London, and in his early days he would erase it completely for certain roles. For example, in ''Zulu,'' Caine played an upper-class English officer. Hoskins' accent is much stronger, and I doubt that he could disguise it effectively with another English accent. His American accent, however, is convincing, as he proves - with a dead-accurate New York accent - in ''Judith Hearne,'' and before that as an American tough guy in ''The Cotton Club.'' What has happened, over the last decade or so, is a sort of democratization of acting roles, and Hoskins' success is a perfect illustration of the phenomenon. Good looks and class - whether assumed or natural - were the criteria by which British leading men used to be chosen. Hoskins' fame and popularity show just how far those values have been inverted.

WHEN I ATTEMPT TO list some of the inconveniences of being a star -invasion of privacy, being approached by strangers - Hoskins brushes them aside: ''You get up one morning, you're feeling miserable, you go for a walk in the park. Bloke comes up to you and says, 'Thought you were great last night. Good luck.' Perfect stranger. Well, I mean, what could be nicer than that? Sets you up. Suddenly, things don't seem so bad. Wonderful, that is. Wonderful.'' He pauses. ''You go in a pub. People see you. 'Cheers, Bob. Hi there, Bob.' Then they leave you alone. Nothing hard about that. 'Course, you've always got your big mouths, but you've always got them, haven't you? Doesn't matter what you do.''

Hoskins looks at his success somewhat incredulously. ''It's all a fluke,'' he says. ''I'm just flavor of the month. Couple of years, they'll forget all about me and I'll just get on with my job. I'm a professional actor, that's all, and I've never been out of work.'' This he says with some pride before going on to list all the pleasure he is deriving from his current stroke of good fortune. I ask him if he's got any plans for the future. He denies that he has.

However, he's certainly not being idle. In the last year, since completing ''Mona Lisa,'' Hoskins has made three films, almost one right after the other: the less-than-successful ''A Prayer for the Dying'' (an Irish Republican Army thriller with Mickey Rourke, based on a novel by Jack Higgins); ''Who Framed Roger Rabbit'' (a Spielberg production with animated and real characters), and ''The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne'' (from the novel by Brian Moore, in which Hoskins stars opposite Maggie Smith). Why is he working so hard? ''I love the job,'' Hoskins says. ''I love it.'' He dismisses any notions that he is striking while the iron is hot. Who would turn down an opportunity to work with Maggie Smith? he asks rhetorically. What about ''A Prayer for the Dying''? ''Alan Bates, Mickey Rourke - wonderful actors.'' The lure would appear to be the very act of working and the conviviality the experience affords.

Last August, Hoskins was off to Czechoslovakia to direct and star in a film he conceived, ''The Raggedy Rawney'' - ''a sort of gypsy fairy story'' is all he will say about it. Again, this was not planned. The offer was made by an independent production company, HandMade Films (which is also financing ''Judith Hearne''), and Hoskins accepted it. He sees it as an opportunity to ''get some mates together, work and have a lot of fun . . . stick a light there, bosh. Shoot it from that angle, bosh, try it another way - great fun.'' He has no further ambitions to direct - he will see how it goes and enjoy the collaboration.

Unprompted, he brings up the question of money. ''You're working hard, you're doing well, and then'' - he holds up an imaginary bank statement - ''you're always bloody overdrawn! You say to your accountant, 'Where's all that bloody money I earned?' '' Now Hoskins' hands rove over a spectral accounts ledger. ''Oh yeah,'' he says. ''Well, we had to stick some there, and then we had to hold some over here, then we had to invest this lot, and get rid of that lot. Bloody marvelous!''

Hoskins is warming up. ''I've got two kids and a dog. We go up Hampstead Heath on a Sunday, all that leather upholstery, two kids and a dog in the back seat. All that beautiful leather, two kids and a dog. . . . There's gonna be a row, isn't there? Bloody great row. Why do I want a row every time I go out?'' He laughs. ''Still, I don't know'' - he's thinking about the money again - ''I might have to leave the country or something.''

For now, the actor and his wife, Linda, a former schoolteacher, and Rosa, 4, and Jack, 2, live in a house in north London. I ask him if he'd contemplate settling in Hollywood. ''No way,'' he says. ''What would I do all day?'' How did he feel about attending the Oscar ceremony, which he did last year when he was nominated for ''Mona Lisa''? ''I love awards. Great, brilliant. I don't care if I win, I just hope the party's good.'' He puts on an American accent: ''How do you feel, Mr. Hoskins? I said, 'I'm just here for the party.' They couldn't understand that, that it doesn't really matter to you, they think I'm winding them up.''

He talks about the difference between British and American actors, how American actors are trapped and channeled by the star system, that to become celebrated is every American actor's dream. In Britain, it's different, he insists. There you can be a hugely respected actor and not be remotely any kind of star. He cites Ian McNeice, a former Royal Shakespeare Company actor, who is in ''Judith Hearne'' with him: ''Ian's not a star, he's not out signing autographs, but everyone - the whole crew - has got this tremendous respect for him because he's such a great actor. Doesn't matter whether you're famous or not - you're judged by the work you do.''

Hoskins is serious about this, or at least concerned that the point be firmly established. He sees himself as a professional actor who has had a fantastic stroke of luck. He will enjoy that run of luck as long as it lasts, but when it runs out, and he's emphatic that it will, it won't bother him. He'll go back to doing television, theater, even provincial repertory. The main thing is to be working, he says, and because he loves acting - loves the ''job'' -the world of acting will be enough for him.

I am somewhat skeptical, but he is adamant. So perhaps this is an explanation for all this furious energy -seizing the opportunities while they present themselves?

But I suspect that Hoskins knows - and this is something else he shares with Michael Caine - that the important element in an actor's career is not so much the quality of the work he does, but to be seen to be working. Caine wins an Oscar for ''Hannah and Her Sisters'' and where is he on Academy Awards night? In the Bahamas, making ''Jaws: The Revenge.''

There is a similar fortuitous shrewdness operating behind Hoskins' choice of films. After the critical success of ''Mona Lisa,'' he plays a role against type in ''A Prayer for the Dying.'' Then ''Judith Hearne,'' a project steeped in integrity. Next comes the big-budget spectacular ''Roger Rabbit.'' Then a low-budget (about $3 million) film about a fairy story. You won't find Bob Hoskins sitting around for three years waiting for the right part to come up. A few years back, Hoskins even made a short black-and-white film called ''The Woman Who Married Clark Gable.'' His fee was a television set - ''a nice one.'' There may be no more strategy behind this constant flow of work than a desire to keep working. Hoskins' pragmatic vision of himself a couple of years hence - back in the theater ''and doing the odd telly job'' - is, if not disingenuous, unduly modest.

HOSKINS, WHO IS 45 years old, started acting almost by accident, when he was 26. Before that, he had been a laborer, window cleaner, merchant seaman, and had studied accountancy for three years. He never went to drama school, and sees that omission as a positive virtue. He learned all his acting, he says, from other actors. I ask him if he has any special tricks, any techniques he has learned that contribute to his own particular style. Hoskins says he has a few, but he doesn't elaborate. Whatever he has learned, he has learned from the people he has worked with. ''You see how they do it and you get a few ideas for yourself.''

Hoskins seems a little uneasy with this line of questioning, and quite understandably. Questions about technique can make acting (or possibly any other art) seem mechanical and rob it of its magic. There is no doubt that there is a fizz and crackle about Hoskins when he is on screen - he is exciting to watch in a way that other perfectly competent actors are not. I wanted to know if he understood this, if it was in any way conscious or knowing, or if it was something entirely natural - a priori, as it were. Great screen acting as opposed to screen acting, I aver, vaguely and without much confidence, seems dependent on the principle of ''less is more''; when your face is in close-up, it's important to remember that the tiniest shifts of emotion are far more powerful than anything remotely histrionic.

Hoskins makes his hands a frame four inches from my face. ''When the lens is that close to your face it can see you think, the camera can see you think.'' ''So what you do is think like hell?'' ''Yeah. You've got this volcano inside you. The lens is close and you've got this volcano inside trying to get out.''

He takes his hands away and we change the subject.

JUDITH HEARNE'' IS A thoughtful film about pretense and self-deception, and the solitary agony of living out one's lies. In it, Hoskins plays a vulnerable, suffering man existing beneath a veneer of seedy self-assurance and hopeful fantasies.

One recent day, on the set of ''Judith Hearne,'' a scene in a church is being shot. Two hundred extras in dowdy 1950's clothes fill the pews. When everything is ready to go, Bob Hoskins and the redoubtable Maggie Smith are brought in. They make a remarkable contrast: she, thin, pale and birdlike; he, robust, solid and beefy. She plays the eponymous heroine, a lonely, middle-aged piano teacher desperate for some romance in her impoverished life. Judith sees Madden as a potential lover, but Madden is interested in her only as a business partner.

In church, they listen to a hell-and-damnation sermon from the local priest, and Madden dozes off, to be roused by a dig in the ribs from Judith.

Hoskins doesn't have to do much. He sits there, his eyelids growing inexorably heavier, his eyes close, his head nods. The elbow in his side rouses him, he looks round and resettles himself in his seat, feigning interest in the rant from the pulpit.

Not very much, but somehow Hoskins makes that scene his own. He does it over, time and again, as they shoot the various angles. Then the camera goes in close. I imagine him thinking, that volcano rumbling inside him. The scene will work marvelously because of the look Hoskins gives Maggie Smith when she wakes him. It's a look of conspiratorial mischief, sober apology being overwhelmed by a kind of guilty glee.

Hoskins is like the naughty boy in a class who keeps getting into trouble, but the malice is so gentle and the remorse so obviously fake that the teacher can't keep a straight face. It's a somewhat convoluted parallel, but it seems to me the most accurate representation of Hoskins' particular brand of irreverent charm. It's highly infectious, and powerfully effective. It should keep him working for years to come.

Copyright 1987 The New York Times Company  
The New York Times