THE luxury hotel straddles a ridge overlooking Beverly Hills and is teeming with the rich and the beautiful. But the tanned women parading through the ornate lobby give only a cursory glance at the "little Australian guy" who sits in a corner of the adjoining lounge.

"Ain't it funny?" Bob Hoskins says. "The people round here who don't know me think I'm Australian. In California, you see, they just don't recognise Cockney."

Why not play a game with them, I suggest, and pretend to be a native? After all, few British actors can imitate an American accent as well as Hoskins.

"Huh, that's something I do only when I have a character to play. When I started in this business, people said: 'Right, you're going to have to take elocution lessons. You're going to have to take deportment classes. You're going to have to learn to do this, you're going to have to learn to do that'. I said: 'Wait a minute, hang on. I'm going to have to learn to talk like I don't? Walk like I don't? Be like I'm not? Where the hell am I going to be in the middle of this? Hey, the job ain't worth it'."

Defiantly proud of his background, he seems to relish the fact that his accent is "a problem" at home as well as abroad. George Orwell said that the English are branded on the tongue, and Hoskins is thrilled to be among those whose speech has been associated with the underdog. He jerks his head to one side and his eyes glint as he fondly considers the power of mere speech to provoke and confound. It is obvious that he enjoys exaggerating the perils.

"Listen," he says with a playfully wicked laugh. "In England, if I walk into someone's house and they don't know me, as soon as I open my mouth they lock up the silver and send the women out of the way."

Of course, the truth is that he would be hard pressed to find anyone in England who would not welcome his charming scowl or colourful voice. Thanks to a 20-year career in film and television - including those amazingly successful advertisements for British Telecom - Hoskins and his accent are firmly in the mainstream. In his more mellow moments, he quietly acknowledges that many of the old cultural and social prejudices are dead or dying.

"The class system is beginning to fall apart. Since the media expanded with rock and roll and film and television, suddenly you have people who are from where I'm from living in millionaire's mansions. I mean, these people could affect the budget of the country. You still have people talking with posh accents but they might have holes in their socks. And people like me drive Porsches."

Sticking to his roots has certainly been good for Hoskins, whose convincing ability to play everybody's Everyman has earned him not only Porsches but popularity on both sides of the Atlantic.

He has at least three films coming out this year: The Secret Agent, his production of Joseph Conrad's novel in which he also plays the lead; TwentyFourSeven, a highly acclaimed urban drama for which he has already earned an award for best actor at the Berlin Film Festival; and Cousine Bette, a film completed last year with Jessica Lange and Elisabeth Shue. When I catch up with him in Los Angeles, he is busy working on his next film, a farce about the pornography industry with the intriguing title of Live Virgin.

"Yeah, that's actually a French film being shot here with an entirely American cast, and I play a character who is sort of a combination of Burt Reynolds and Joe Pesci."

But, I hasten to remind him, the cast cannot be entirely American if he's in it.

"Oh, yeah, I always forget that when I'm playing an American character. You get into the part and begin thinking you're just like everyone else in the cast."

Strangely enough, this child of the London working class can make himself look so much like an ordinary American that only a lapse into his Cockney accent reminds Hollywood's good and great that he is actually "the little Australian guy".

None of this seems to trouble Hoskins. "I can't worry about how people think of me. All I know about myself is what I see when I shave in the morning. I don't know what I look like, what impression people have got of me. It was only when I came into this business and someone gave me a box to stand on to kiss Cher that I realised I was short."

To say the least, casting him as Cher's lover in Mermaids was unconventional. "I know, but she cast me. I said: 'Why the hell did you cast me? You could have had Robert Redford or anybody you liked'. She said: 'Bob, you're the only man I know who looks like he eats hamburgers and goes to ball games'. And I don't, but there you are. She wanted me anyway." In fact, even his English roots are not exactly what they appear to be. He was born in the early days of the war, not in London but Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk where his mother had been sent to relative safety.

"When the bombing was at its height, and I was two weeks old, they sent us back to London, where I spent the first three years of my life under a kitchen table. Buzz bombs, rockets, the whole lot fell on London and the kitchen table was our usual shelter."

He began his performing career as a comedian working in pubs and only gradually worked his way into the theatre, where his natural talent for acting eventually won him the part of Iago to Anthony Hopkins's Othello.

Hopkins has remained a friend and the two later worked brilliantly together in Oliver Stone's Nixon, with Hoskins portraying the malevolent J. Edgar Hoover. It is to his friend Michael Caine, however, that he gives the real credit for making his film career possible. Caine, he says, created the first opportunities for British actors who did not have, or want, the "RAF accent" so popular in postwar films.

"He opened the gates for all of us. In his early films, he walked in playing the lead character with a Cockney accent, which had never been done before, and he also played the lead character in glasses - another first. The Ipcress File and Alfie changed everyone's thoughts about what could work in films." In the early years of his career, Hoskins married, had two children, divorced and vowed never to marry again. And then along came his present wife, Linda, who won his heart at first sight. In a romantic twist that belongs in a Cockney fairy tale, they met in a pub on the day that Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer were married.

"After my first marriage, I swore that was it. Never again. But what I did do was imagine the ideal kind of woman that would make me change my mind. So I made up this woman in my head. It wasn't so much what she would look like, but what she would be like. I made up a kind of imaginary personality for her. Then I walked into a pub on the royal wedding day, and there she was. She didn't stand a chance. I said to myself: 'You're mine baby, you're mine'."

They married in 1982 and now have two teenaged children for whom they are trying to create a reasonably normal life at their home in Chalk Farm. The only problem is that Hoskins is so much in demand that he is almost constantly on the move. "Whenever possible, I try to have Linda and the kids with me. But on this trip, it's just Sammy and me."

Sammy Pasha is an ex-London taxi driver who has been working for almost 20 years as Hoskins's stand-in, driver and - the actor adds jokingly - "amanuensis". In an accent not unlike Bob's, Sammy adds: "Yeah, when we first met on a job years ago neither one of us knew much about this business, so it was a case of: 'You watch my ass, and I'll watch yours'. We look out for each other."

Together, they look a little uncomfortable amid the fancy surroundings of their hotel. It has been raining hard in California, and they've had to spend far too much time inside, which gives these two Londoners the slightly dazed look of a couple of mates who went out for a drive, took the wrong turn on the M25 and somehow ended up in LA.

But scratch the surface of Hoskins and you'll find that he is much more complex than the common man he plays so well. His film of The Secret Agent is confusing and a bit turgid at times, but it is the work of someone who obviously loves sophisticated drama. He is well read and can discuss the treacherous ways of Joseph Conrad's gloomy world with the insight of a seasoned scholar.

Likewise, his decision to star in director Shane Meadows's TwentyFourSeven is a testament to his faith in aspiring young artists who have serious stories to tell. In this, Hoskins plays a homeless man who makes a new life for himself as the leader of a ragged group of amateur boxers.

"Shane, who is just 24, and comes from the slums of Nottingham, is an incredible guy. For years, he has been making small films with his mates, using some pretty basic equipment. But it's good stuff, and I couldn't turn him down when he came to me with a script that he had created specifically with me in mind.

"I turned up to do it and most of the cast were his mates off the streets of Nottingham. And I thought: 'They're going to see me as some right old fogey, some old fart'. But I was just accepted. They didn't expect me to lead, and they certainly didn't ask me to follow. They just sort of accepted me as one of the chaps. I'll tell you something, when you get to my age and you suddenly realise you've still got street cred, that makes you feel awfully good."

Indeed, Hoskins seems to be winning new fans from both ends of the social scale. "I was at the National doing Guys and Dolls, and this chap turned up at my dressing room - can't tell you his name because he is a member of the Royal Family."

Hoskins puts his nose in the air and pretends to address himself in an exaggerated upper-class accent: " 'Hello. What I really want to do is employ you. You see, the problem is I'm frightfully hip, but speaking like this, no one takes me seriously. So what I want to learn from you, Mr Hoskins, is how to talk like you'."

It is a very funny performance and I doubt that even half of it is true. But the look of satisfaction on his face is genuine. The toffs think he's hip, the tough lads in the Midlands respect him and Hollywood keeps him working.

"Everybody talks about how terrible it is to be famous. I love being famous, I think it's great. You get to know some really interesting people, I tell you.

"The only trouble is that, since I made those BT commercials, I've found that people won't come up and chat anymore. I've always been the kind of guy that strangers want to talk to. But now they just come up and say: 'It's good to talk', and run away laughing."