BOB HOSKINS is a devoted family man with a talent for portraying psychopaths.

As he returns to the West End stage, he tells MARY RIDDELL about overcoming depression and the truth about those violent tendencies

There is a point during Bob Hoskins's lunch break when I fear we are going to drown in pea soup. First the waitress brings a bowl of it. Then Bob sends it away, asking politely if she could serve it up in a plastic takeaway mug, presumably so that he can drink rather than slurp the contents. Back it comes in a brown carrier bag. By then a second waitress, anxious that the Hoskins table appears soupless, is swooping in with another bowlful. 'Naah, got some already, love,' says Bob politely.

The pea soup glut seems more than just an attempt to pander to a star.

Though Hoskins is never autocratic, he does inspire a certain nerviness.

Perhaps that is down to the parts he plays.

From The Long Good Friday onwards, he has specialised in gangsters and racketeers, with the odd dictator, such as Mussolini and Noriega, thrown in.

In theory, that professional menace should be offset by his looks and manner. Hoskins, short and pointy-eared, is a diamond geezer whose London twang makes Bert, Dick Van Dyke's chimney sweep in Mary Poppins, sound like Lady Bracknell. But the jolly cockney stereotype seems hardly more accurate than that of the New York hood. Hoskins is not forbidding, exactly, but he is mysterious.

His early roles, in Dennis Potter's television series, Pennies From Heaven, and in the film Mona Lisa, established him as a brilliant actor, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit made him universally recognisable. He has never stopped working, but this autumn marks a Bob Hoskins revival. Next month he stars alongside Dame Judi Dench in Mrs Henderson Presents, a movie about the celebrated Windmill Theatre. He also plays a blind psychiatrist in Stay, a U.S. campus film, and he has just finished making Truth, Justice And The American Way. There might be a fourth movie in the offing, but he cannot quite remember. 'Oh, I dunno. I just do them,' he says vaguely. 'I don't know what they are.' He has recently opened in As You Desire Me, Luigi Pirandello's play about a nightclub singer, played by Kristin Scott Thomas.

Staged on Broadway in 1930, it was adapted as a film for Greta Garbo two years later. Its West End revival is also a resurrection of Hoskins's stage career. Although he once worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company, stunning the critics as Nathan Detroit in Guys And Dolls, he last took a theatre part in 1996, as a piano teacher in a play called Old Wicked Songs, which sunk without trace. 'It was awful,' he says flatly.

His latest comeback took some soul-searching, not because he fears scrutiny, or even because he suffers so badly from stage fright that he has been physically ill before going on.

'It's dreadful. I get terrified. Afterwards, there is nothing to compare with the adrenaline. But you get home, and you're just sitting in the kitchen, knowing that all your family is asleep.' The prospect of solitary nights seems to have been Hoskins's chief worry when he was deciding whether, at 63, he really wanted to be on stage again. He was persuaded by his second wife Linda's promise that she would share his nocturnal lifestyle and be around after every performance. 'She's going to adapt to me,' he says, in a way that suggests no lesser deal would have tempted him back to the stage.

Hoskins loves his family. His daughter, Rosa, 22, an aspiring actress, lives in the basement flat of the family's large home in what I thought was London's smart Primrose Hill, but which he insists is in the less posh Chalk Farm.

His son, Jack, 20, who works for a children's theatre company, is installed in the attic flat.

The floors in between are for Bob and Linda, a former teacher whom he married in 1982.

He sounds a very dependent husband, particularly where money is concerned.

His previous interviews are so littered with fees and pound signs that I thought he must be very materialistic, but he claims he is clueless about finance.

'When I married Linda, I said, "There's the details of our bank account. Your name's on it, and it's all up to you. If you spend it, we're broke; if you keep it, we're rich." I still ain't got any idea how much we've got. All I know is how much I have in my pocket. Sometimes I tell Linda that we're broke. She says, "What are you talking about? Of course we're not. Just go and get some money out of the bank."' His only other financial adviser was his old friend, Michael Caine, who cautioned him 'never to buy an effing boat, right'. I suspect that he enjoys both the prestige of not wanting a vulgar gin palace and the fact that he could have one, cash down, if he wished. Bob Hoskins may be innocent about money, but everything in his background suggests he values it very much.

He was born a wartime evacuee in Suffolk, moving back to Finsbury Park, north London, when he was a few weeks old. His mother, Elsie, was a nursery nurse, and his father, Bob, a bookkeeper. Just as his background has never quite seemed to explain the extravagant cockney accent, his parents' occupations do not match the extreme, working-class poverty in which he insists the family lived.

It seems certain, though, that Hoskins, a dyslexic, short-sighted low-achiever who left school with one O-level, lacked affluent prospects. He had a dizzying range of jobs, including a fortnight in the Norwegian merchant navy, window-cleaning, a spell in a kibbutz and three years' accountancy training, which he detested, at his father's firm. Beguiled by hard men and the low life (he says he knew the Krays and Richardsons and that Reggie Kray suggested, much later, that they produce a cookery book together), he never drifted into crime. Instead, at 25, he accompanied a friend to an acting audition and got the part himself. 'It was a young yob. Just up my street.'

By then he was married to Jane Livesey, a drama teacher, with whom he had two children, Alexander and Sarah, now in their 30s. The relationship was a disaster which lasted for a decade only because, he says, he could not bear to leave his children. 'It just didn't work out for either of us. She was a perfectly good woman, and I learned a lot from her. But, personalitywise, it was all wrong.' This seems an understatement. He has always claimed that the financial settlement left him so poor that he had to live in a Jeep, on Pounds 50 a week, while she hinted that he had violent tendencies. Does he? I expect him to dismiss this idea as insulting, or just ludicrous, but he does not wholly deny a capacity for violence.

'I don't know. Actually to hit somebody you're living with, probably not. But I do find being violent on stage or in a film a very easy thing to find.

The same goes for anger.

'Recently I had to play a Pope on Italian television, and being good was murder. Everything, eventually, has to come from you. I had to find some little grain of goodness, which I strangled to death. I do think I could certainly be violent, very violent, if ever my family was threatened.'

He is, he says, a wholly faithful husband. 'Oh, yeah. I remember one bird hanging round me. I said, "Look, love, a domestic dog sniffs round anything. A wolf mates once, and that's for life. I ain't no dog." Linda's 59. I couldn't live with a young bimbo. When I'm getting aches and pains I want to be able to share them. You need someone who's going through the same things as you.' I presume that he had the odd fling during his first marriage, but he says, 'Not really. I was a child of the Sixties, but I was a bit out of my depth.' He remembers, with horror, 'waking up one morning and having to ask a woman if she'd mind telling me her name, and whether we would see each other again.'

Hoskins is undoubtedly a family man. His beloved mother died of cancer 20 years ago, but his father, now 92, lived for many years in his son's basement flat before moving recently into sheltered accommodation. Clannish he may be, but Hoskins has never denied a bleaker, depressive side. After he made Roger Rabbit, he was haunted by images of weasels, and he suffered a nervous breakdown after his marriage to Jane ended. He was treated by a Harley Street psychiatrist, until an academic friend persuaded him to stage a one-man show he'd written himself.

'She told me that if I was having a breakdown, I could have it on her stage. I was terrified, but the audience loved it. Afterwards, my friend brought me a bottle of champagne and said, "Welcome back to sanity, kid." The spell was broken.' Hoskins's love of anecdotes like that suggests he is polished at projecting a certain image. Does he adopt the persona people expect of him?

'Do I ever slip into character, you mean? You've got to pay me for that sort of thing, love.' The sharpness of this response suggests that Hoskins might be less transparent than he seems.

There are other clues. When Hoskins was a child growing up alone, he invented an imaginary sister. Now he says that after his first marriage fell apart, he conjured up an ideal companion.

'I started making up this woman in my head - the sort of person with whom I could have a happy life. On (Princess) Diana's wedding day, I walked into the pub, and there she was.

The moment I saw Linda, I knew we could build a life. I'd already done Pennies From Heaven, and Linda knew who I was. I don't think she was that impressed, though.' It seems likely that Hoskins's fantasy world goes further than dreaming up a sister and a future wife. Like many good actors, he admits that, occasionally, he gets too close to a part. 'A couple of years ago, I played a serial killer in a film called Felicia's Journey. Two weeks after I'd finished filming, Linda asked if I realised how strangely I was behaving, and I thought, "Oh my God." Some of the character's strangeness had obviously stayed with me.' So is Hoskins the homely nice guy with a heart of gold, or the darker, brooding character torn between fragility and toughness? I would guess that he has spent most of his life blurring the boundaries between the two, so skilfully that no one can quite decipher who Bob Hoskins really is.

Perhaps not even the arch-illusionist himself.