BOB Hoskins has finished lunch and has been waylaid by Charles Dance and a chilled glass of champers in the bar. An empty bottle of bubbly lies in the corner of the penthouse hotel room as evidence that the actor famous for his dropped aitches and man-of-the-people bonhomie has journeyed far from the working-class roots he displays so readily. And to think that Class War, the anarchist group, used to splash the trademark Hoskins grimace on their Bash The Rich posters.

The diminutive Hoskins, now 55, drops his leather jacket on the sofa and announces: "I'll just have a wee before we start."

Wait a minute, a wee? Let's scrap the posh start to this piece and go back to the beginning. You see, despite the trappings which Bob Hoskins loves to surround himself in, he is not posh. Neither is he working-class, however. Those glottal stops and throttled vowels which have marked him out from the other actors of his generation are worked on, shaped and expounded by the son of a book-keeper and a nursery teacher. No Bow bells to be heard for miles. Born in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, in fact.

He says: "Me and Michael Caine, when we're on set nobody can understand a word we're saying to each other. Not a ****ing word."

Hoskins is a happy man today.

When asked how he feels about being an actor, his well-worn response is: "Best job I ever had." And anyone taking a look at the trappings of fame and fortune - the Bolly, the flotilla of PR people, the expensive but rumpled clothes - would not have to wonder why. Hoskins has made serious dosh, few serious films but serious dosh.

"I always think if I hadn't have gone into acting that I'd have been robbing banks, that's the sort of man I am. I'm not one for the old nine-to-five and I've always fancied myself," he says. "The good thing about acting is that you get all this enjoyment and every so often someone hands you a cheque which is actually bigger than you get for robbing a bank."

There is no sign today of the man who suffered a nervous breakdown in 1978 when his marriage to Jane Livesey, his first wife, ended in divorce proceedings, perhaps unsurprisingly, after he took a girlfriend to stay with him in a mud hut while filming Zulu Dawn. Nor of the man who admits he neglected his two children from the marriage in favour of developing his career.

Since 1982, he has been married to Linda Banwell, a former schoolteacher three years his junior, and, fingers sufficiently burnt from his earlier experiences, he made the decision to cut down on his work to spend more time with their children Rosa, 13, and Jack, 12. "I had made up this ideal partner in my mind and I walked into this pub and there she was. She didn't have a chance. I was totally ruthless.

"My former missus had put me in so much debt that I was living in the back of a Jeep at the time. I was earning a fortune but the bank had taken over all my debt and were paying me GBP 50 a week. I parked myself outside Linda's house and I said: 'Are you going to leave me out here then?' She just didn't have a chance."

He says Linda is the only woman who finds him sexy and the only person he is grateful to for finding him sexy.

But Hoskins is not 100 per cent faithful. He also has eyes for Jessica Rabbit, one of his unlikely co-stars, who he declared to a magazine he would most like to have sex with.

And it gets worse. In 1988 doctors told Hoskins to take a year off after making the live/animation Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The stress of shooting a film which required him to react to invisible co-stars (the animated bits were added in later) left Hoskins suffering from severe hallucinations. Cartoon weasels were popping out of his bedroom walls and he was dogged by the image of Bugs Bunny flashing his rear end at his dear old mum.

Disturbing times in the Hoskins household indeed.

These days, however, his vision is back to normal and family life could not be sweeter. His second family home on the Sussex coast provides a welcome oasis of calm, and even if his cheeky chappie public persona is starting to look a little worn through overuse, it still excuses him from giving too much of himself away to journalists.

Hoskins has long since become accustomed to answering questions about the huge span of experience the fates have lobbed his way. "Yeah, I was homeless for a while when I was a kid, lived on the streets," he explains, as if it were a phase that we all might go through. "You have to deal with a lot of persecution. That's the worst."

And is the young Hoskins who slept in doorways still the same Hoskins who commands million-dollar fees in Tinseltown? Such questions slide off him with ease.

"It's just a job," he says, flatly. "Every now and then you look at the bank balance and that's a bit of a shock.

But for me it's just work. I love doing it and I love the people." Perhaps it was the lunch, but this afternoon we are definitely getting Hoskins Lite.

Now the new yoof film TwentyFourSeven has come along to remind everyone what a fine actor he can be, if he gives himself the chance and if the parts are there in the first place. A gritty, low-budget, black-and-white British film about a local amateur boxing club gives Hoskins the chance to positively burn with commitment as the boxing coach bringing self-respect to the lives of Nottingham youngsters. Driven by a desire to put something back into the community, Hoskins wins the confidence of unemployed lads, turns a disused local hall into an amateur boxing club, and sets up a team contest against much more experienced opposition.

This is no Rocky-ish exercise in wish-fulfilment however, nor does it play on the spirited whimsy of The Full Monty. Instead, this powerful first feature from Shane Meadows, the 24-year-old writer-director who has become the hot new name in British cinema, puts the bravest of faces on a legacy of hopelessness, all the while suggesting seething anger at the prospect of teenage lives left to rot. It gives Hoskins the best showcase he has had since his big-hearted chauffeur in Mona Lisa. And he knows it.

"I would think this film is the most important thing I've ever done," he says, straight up. "To be able to play someone this boisterous and this tough, but this man who's also a social inept and crippled with loneliness, that's a challenge. You don't get offered too many parts like this. I just jumped at it."

Not a bit of wonder either, when you consider what Hoskins has been doing with himself for the past few years. Who cannot forget those "Good to talk" television adverts for British Telecom which irritated a nation beyond belief? "What's become of one of Britain's best talents?" went up the cry. "Bob has lost the plot."

The timing was the problem.

Hoskins had just rocketed to stardom with Who Framed Roger Rabbit, still his biggest Hollywood role. So he came out of his BT contract at least GBP 500,000 better off. But just what was the electrifying performer who galvanised the British crime movie back in The Long Good Friday doing in production-line Nineties junk like Super Mario Bros, the disastrous movie-of-the-computer -game? And why did the man who had an entire nation glued to its television screens for Pennies From Heaven, the classic Seventies Dennis Potter series, take on a string of movie duds he did not have to do.

Somehow, somewhere, it had all gone terribly wrong. In the era of Trainspotting and Cool Britannia, the man who was the face of British film in the Eighties was beginning to look somewhat out of touch. Got the millions, got the north London mansion along the street from Noel Gallagher, settled in with the wife and children, best mates with Michael Caine. But where was the hunger for the meaty roles that put him there in the first place?

A 1942 war-baby born in Suffolk, he was raised in North London, where his father, Robert, was a book-keeper, and his mother, Elsie, a nursery-school teacher. So, no East-Ender our Bob then, despite the familiar gorblimey accent, but the man has certainly been around. A school-leaver at 16 with one O-level, he was initially a porter at the old Covent Garden fruit market, before a turn in the Norwegian merchant navy, a brief spell in his dad's office, and then off to do the kibbutz trail and beyond in the Middle East.

Back in London, he started hanging around the Unity Theatre, a socially improving operation founded in the Thirties, where he landed his first amateur role on stage entirely by chance. Having been out for a drink with a mate, he accompanied him to auditions and got the part himself.

By 1969 he had gone professional, and three years later found himself on stage at the Royal Court, opposite Sir John Gielgud. Yes, John Gielgud.

Bob Hoskins and John Gielgud, what an act. And John says, listen Bob, you are talented. You can go somewhere. And Hoskins did, slowly but surely.

His television break was to come with the adult literacy series On The Move before Pennies From Heaven made his face known all over Britain, and The Long Good Friday launched his film career (even if he had to sue Lew Grade for trying to dub someone else's voice in so the Americans could understand it).

Mona Lisa won him the Best Actor at Cannes and an Academy Nomination that took him to the Oscars ceremony so he could lose out to Paul Newman.

Now there is not talk of Academy Awards, only of the fun he had working with the young people in this latest production. On screen, his youth worker Darcy is classic Hoskins. Blue-collar but never patronising, emotions all on the surface, able to handle himself in a tight corner. "I've played a lot of hard men with compassion and that was what Shane wanted from me here," he reflects, his close-cropped haircut and frameless glasses giving him the look of an intellectual bovver-boy.

"I thought the script was just going to be another Long Good Friday copy, another Mona Lisa rip-off, but it had real compassion, and insight extraordinary in one so young."

Hoskins, indeed, is so keen on the film that he hardly wants to talk about anything else. And he is especially keen to say how well he got on with the juvenile cast, many of whom were the director's mates, had been in the self -financed videos with which Meadows made his reputation and were from the run -down area in which the film was shot. "I thought I was going to go down like a cup of cold sick, but they just took to me. It wasn't like I was a film star, or any of that bullshit. I was just one of the chaps."

So Hoskins wants us to know he is still in with The Kids. Still one-of-us, even now that he is on the supertax side of upwardly mobile. Of course, this sort of self-mythologising comes with the star territory, especially in a country much more comfortable with the salt-of-the-earth Cockney than the self -made man quaffing the Bolly over a penthouse view.

Copyright 1998 The Scotsman Publications Ltd.  
The Scotsman