On a brownish afternoon in a brownish London hotel, Bob Hoskins is pondering life in the fairground of fame. "Celebrity is hard," he says. "It's hard work. Everywhere you go, you've got to do the business. You've got to be on the ball." He smiles, ingratiatingly, inclines his cannonball of a head and waves a meaty hand at his imaginary fans.

Of course, it's wonderful to be flavour of the month, he admits. After he played a small-time London crook in Mona Lisa in 1986, people were stopping him in the street. "But I must say, it was a relief when it started to die down." He's not what he calls a natural media flower like ... whatsername.

Whatsername?

"Hugh Grant's ex. She's brilliant. Made a career out of being a media flower. She's always there. There's not a bad photograph of her. I've got nothing but respect for that. But it's real hard work."

Hoskins, by contrast, has been known to let his professionalism slip. He can be cantankerous and unpredictable. Disobligingly unflowerlike. "I'm not very good at being dishonest with the public. If I'm pissed off, I'm pissed off." But today, sitting in his cuddly cardy with a gin and tonic at his elbow, he is mellow as a pumpkin and almost as round. Officially, he doesn't smoke, but a packet of Camel cigarettes has appeared to help him through the interview. Some people have affairs, he says; he has a crafty smoke.

His head is frosted with soft stubble. The familiar hard-boiled features, so easily contorted into hate and anger on screen, are merry and bright. He's always been the first to mock his very bankable physiognomy, as though by calling himself a crippled bat with a face like a squashed cabbage he can fend off worse remarks from others. Today, he tries another tack. "I don't know what I look like to you," he says, "but as far as I am concerned, I am a young, handsome chap holding forth, not some little old man in glasses with a bald head."

Hoskins's mastery of rogues and psychopathic bruisers has given him a useful alter ego. But he is not quite as amused as he used to be at being characterised as a rampaging blood-letter. His roles are getting quieter, more complex, closer to the real Hoskins, a family-minded softie who likes nothing better than hanging out at home and perfecting his dishwasher-loading technique.

"When I get home, I'm a bit of a hermit," he says. "It's hard to winkle me out." But he prosecutes his privacy with gangland's courteous rules of engagement. "Linda, my wife, is the social secretary. Sometimes, people get really rude. They don't realise that if they want to meet me, they've gotta be nice to her, and if they're not, forget it."

Hoskins is just back from two months' filming with computer-generated dinosaurs in New Zealand, an experience he found rather more congenial than his time in Hollywood. "I felt less cut off in New Zealand, I like America and I've always had a good time there, but I felt less of a foreigner in New Zealand."

In BBC1's reptile-infested Christmas adventure, The Lost World, Hoskins plays Arthur Conan Doyle's scientific renegade, Professor George Challenger, who acts on a hunch that prehistoric beasts survive in the Amazon rainforest. Huge ratings are anticipated.

A Panama-hatted greybeard, wearing one of those khaki waistcoats that have more pockets than a shoe-tidy, Challenger is the made-in-heaven Hoskins character - stubborn, irascible, flamboyant and a bit of a conman.

The Hoskins-fest continues into the new year with a gentle film, Last Orders, adapted from Graham Swift's Booker-winning novel. This wonderful collector's item shows him in his subtlest role yet, a big-hearted loser called Ray who has to wait half a lifetime to be with the woman he loves. "One of the best jobs I've ever had," says Hoskins. "No fights. No guns. Just straight emotion. I'm not a gangster and I'm not a tough guy. Ray is closer to me than anybody else I have ever played.

"Some films, you look at them and you think, `Oh dear, this is gonna go down like a cuppa cold sick.' Or you see a film and know it will be successful even if you don't like it much. But this one, it was so personal to all of us that I saw it and loved it."

In Last Orders, Hoskins, David Hemmings and Tom Courtenay embark on a sentimental journey to carry out the last wish of a departed friend, Michael Caine. Helen Mirren, Hoskins's trophy wife in The Long Good Friday all those years ago, plays Caine's widow, a woman Ray has secretly always loved. Ray Winstone plays Caine's wideboy son. "One of the great joys in this business," Hoskins says, expansively, "is working with talent. And you couldn't get more talented than this mob. It's great to work with people who've got over the ego bit. No one's got to prove anything."

Bob Hoskins is the archetypal working class bloke to whom something exceptional happened one day while he was propping up a bar. The anecdote is familiar but bears repetition well. While waiting for a friend who was auditioning for the Unity Theatre in King's Cross, he was mistaken for the next candidate and found himself reading from an unseen script. He was offered the main part. "I walked on the stage and found there were other people in the playground; an audience to show off to. I was home."

Thirteen years on, he had another piece of luck in a public bar: he met Linda. By now, he was established as a magnetic screen actor, but he had suffered a nervous breakdown after the split from his first wife ("It was a terrible time. To walk away from two kids is not easy") and was on his uppers, living in the back of his Jeep after an expensive divorce.

"I'd decided marriage was not for me. But I started imagining the ideal kind of woman who might make me change my mind. Not what she would look like, but what she would be like. I made up an imaginary personality for her. Then, I walked into a pub on the wedding day of Charles and Diana in 1981, and there she was. She was chatting to a friend. I worked my way into the conversation and that was her. I decided then: you're mine. She didn't stand a chance really."

Bob and Linda Hoskins live in north London with their two children, Rosa, 18, and Jack, 16. He writes, listens to music, cooks and most of all relishes the protection against loneliness that married life has finally brought. "Loneliness is a phobia with me. It's something I've always been frightened of. A nervous breakdown is lonely. It's like being inside a bubble of grief. You can't get out of that bubble to meet anybody, however sympathetic and friendly."

He suffered quite a different kind of breakdown through overwork, after fraternising with a lot of cartoon characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. "I had trained myself to hallucinate," he says, "and in the end it screwed up my brain. I would be sitting talking normally and suddenly a weasel would creep out of the wall at me." His doctors told him to go to bed for five months. He didn't work for a year.

Hallucinations apart, he agrees that acting is a cushy number, especially on film. "You turn up in the morning and you are taken into this rather nice trailer with the make-up ladies. There's nice music playing. They get you cups of tea. They look after you. Not only do they make you up, they set you up for the day. There are all these people asking if you are happy and `Do you want anything?'. It's a really nice life.

"Emotionally, though, it's killing. You are dealing with a profession that demands the most extreme passions and emotions known to man and you have to turn them on again and again."

Hoskins was born in Bury St Edmunds in 1943 and brought up in Finsbury Park, where his now famous accent was fashioned to give him a certain amount of north London street cred with local gangs. His father was a bookkeeper and his mother a nursery school teacher. To both of them, he demonstrates the kind of intense loyalty that has almost gone out of fashion.

One of the best things about having money, he says, is that he could ensure his mother had a pain-free send-off when she was dying of cancer. "I could put her in a hospital and say to the doctors: Right, there's no chance she is going to live. I want that lady to go out as high as a kite. So they put her on a drip and she had a wonderful time."

He bought a big house in Hampstead so that his father could have a flat downstairs with his own front door. "He's nearly 90 and he's got girlfriends. Swears to me he can't do that sort of thing any more. But they stay the weekend ..." So there's hope for him, too, he thinks.

Artistic rather than practical, Hoskins has nevertheless mastered one domestic chore. Anyone who still thinks of him as a thug should listen to his monologue on loading a dishwasher. "I had no idea about washing up," he burbles. "The first clever thing Linda did when we got together was buy a washing-up machine. Cups, glasses, cutlery, plates ... it's totally scientific, the way I load it. Linda bungs them all in. I get totally pissed off. So I offer to clear up. I'm the best packer of a washing-up machine you have ever seen in your life." Who'd dare to doubt it?