STOP ME IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE ... No one ever called Bob Hoskins pretty. The story goes that when he was a kid, growing up off the Holloway Road in North London, his mum once lost him. When she bewailed the fact that thieves had stolen him, his auntie quipped that with his looks, "If they have taken him, I can tell you they'll soon fucking bring him back." Those glinting eyes, that squidgy nose and piranha-like grin meant Hoskins was never going to be the new Michael Caine. The new Al Capone perhaps; but not a big movie star. Yet in 1978 when-he appeared as the lead in Dennis Potter's TV musical Pennies From Heaven, the Daily Mirror went wild for this "leering charmer with a song in his heart". And when he starred as the ruthless East End gangster Harold Shand in the movie The Long Good Friday he received the ultimate accolade: fan mail from the Kray twins. It had been a long haul through a string of parts - all from the Madame Tussaud's of turpitude and villainy. He played Napoleon, Richard III and the malevolent Iago in Othello; he's been a rock'n'roll manager in The Wall, the scheming Machiavellian assassin Bosola in The Duchess Of Malfi, a bullying policeman in The Honorary Consul, even Ronnie Kray himself in England, England. The National Theatre cast him as Nathan Detroit in their Guys And Dolls, while Italian TV called on him to play Mussolini. But when Francis Ford Coppola chose him to play Owney Madden, the real-life gangster clubowner of the Cotton Club, Hoskins knew he'd really made it. "New York," he'd always felt, "was like Dalston - only bigger." But there he was in the Big Apple, being courted by the elite as if he were some cockney reincarnation of Edward G. Robinson. He looked round at his drinking partners one night, and there were the faces of Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro. Their aunties probably never thought they were pretty either. THE CHEEKY CHAPPY
"You wouldn't think I was sexy to look at me, would you? Well, I 'ave a go, lady. I 'ave a go, don't I? I do. I 'ave a go . . . " One of Bob Hoskins' earliest memories is visiting the old Finsbury Park Empire, his local music hall and variety theatre. His mum and dad had been taking him since he was four years old. In the late Forties, during the glorious years of cold winters, fuel shortages and chocolate rationing, the seasoned veterans of the halls made young Hoskins gurgle with delight. "Max Miller, Jewell and Wariss, Mrs Shufflewick, Norman Evans - all of 'em were my heroes," he recalls, nearly forty years on. "But Jimmy James was the greatest. One night he came on and sat on the corner of the stage talking to the band. It was the funniest number I've ever seen in my life. Just brilliant. Seeing that, you think that's talent, sunshine, real talent. And you think - bang! - I can have a go." He's been having a go ever since - even though it took 25 years for him to try acting. He hadn't been idle. He'd had a go at thieving, lorry-driving, window-cleaning, steeplejacking; he'd been a Covent Garden porter, a seaman, everything from a circus fire-eater to a trainee accountant. He'd wandered from the streetcorners of his native manor out to the wilds of Arabia where honest - he was once even adopted as a mad Englishman by a tribe of Bedouin. But his progress was not so much rake-like as desperate. And his conversion to the thespian art was typically by chance, immortalised in the News Of The World headline: "A Pint Turned Bob Into An Instant Actor". His story goes that he was getting drunk with a friend at the bar of the Unity Theatre. He walked upstairs into the auditions on a whim, read a scene, and landed a part. He woke up to find himself in repertory at Stoke-on-Trent asking, "How'd you play this game?" "When I became an actor," he remembers, “my mum was really pleased I'd settled into what seemed a steady job. Because everyone said I'd wind up on the gallows." In person Hoskins tells all these tales with the virtuoso timing of a comedian. He spins them out, peppers them with asides and accents, rolls his eyes or flashes that piranha grin until the roars of laughter engulf his audience. Ever hear the one about Richard Gere as King David drinking with Bob Hoskins, shaven for Mussolini? Or the one about dodging the security police during Zulu Dawn in South Africa? Or when a knight of the realm suggested Hoskins wear a leather jacket to improve his image? Or the one about . . . ? All the while he moves his "five-foot-six and cubic" frame in rhythm with his patter, clapping his hands or gesticulating, effortlessly judging the best comic moment as he slips from doe-eyed innocent to bug-eyed monster. That versatile quality made him famous. As Arthur Parker in Pennies From Heaven he switched between dreamlike fantasy and brutal misery. Arthur was a real cheeky chappy, a lecher and a liar with a heart of gold, whose leering charm didn't save him from the gallows. "I played a lot of myself in Pennies From Heaven," says Hoskins. "I'd had a nervous breakdown just before that. I got a divorce, you know what I mean . . . The point is that by the time I got to Pennies . . . I knew what a man in that state is like. It wasn't an easy part to play, but I knew where I was coming from. Because most of Arthur Parker was pain. For eight months I had to go in and have a nervous breakdown daily ... I think if I hadn't had one before, I would have had one afterwards." The first advice he had about acting had been to play it from the guts. So he doesn't hide behind different characters, so much as charge performances with different aspects of himself. "In acting you push to depths of yourself which most people wouldn't have the chance to - or wouldn't want to. You're showing private moments of a life. Once you present yourself as Harold Shand or Iago, and realise that it's inside you, it can be frightening, can put you in the loony bin. Or you can accept it, understand it, and channel it." By the time he was 40, Hoskins was in his prime as an actor, earning rave reviews for Guys And Dolls. But after a grueling divorce case, and a marathon legal fight to prevent his voice being dubbed for the US release of The Long Good Friday, he was exhausted, broke and homeless. All this was before he'd even heard of a movie called The Cotton Club. LIFE WITH FRANCIS
"It's gonna be fine, Bob." It was supposed to reunite the team behind The Godfather - producer Robert Evans, director Francis Ford Coppola, writer Mario Puzo - in a hot-blooded gangster musical based around the legendary Harlem nightclub where Duke Ellington's music had taken off. Evans pitched it as "Gangsters, music, pussy - how could I lose?" Unfortunately the next couple of years were to show him exactly how. But for Hoskins the chance to join the helter skelter came out of the blue one night. His story starts with a phone call. SCENE I Chez Hoskins, Friday midnight. A phone rings, waking the baby. Hoskins angrily picks up the receiver and listens to the transatlantic clicks. On the other end of the line is a man with a thick American-Italian accent.
Voice: Hi (pause). This is Francis Ford Coppola. Hoskins slams the receiver down. SCENE 2 Chez Hoskins, a few minutes later. The phone rings. It is the same man. This time the accent is even thicker.
Coppola: Nah, nah, nah. This is Coppola! Are you gonna do the film? SCENE 3 New York. Monday pm. Hoskins (narrating over frantic car ride): - So my Concorde got delayed, I didn't get there till Monday afternoon, I got taken straight off the plane, driven straight to the studios, shoved in front of a video camera . . . SCENE 4 Astoria Studios, moments later. Hoskins (angry, jet-lagged): ... So everybody's done a read through, and in front of two hundred New York actors - right! - I had to play a New York gangster. And Coppola gives me this four page speech. A four page fucking speech!! Nobody else had a word. And of course I'd never seen the speech before. It was nothing to do with the script I'd had.
Coppola: (rubbing his hands with glee): OK, we're gonna break the ice. Instead of the promised ten weeks, it took eight months. But what followed, of course, was anything but fine. Hoskins was to emerge with flying colours from the whole affair. He stole the best reviews from the New York Times and most other critics. But behind the fictional story of power, corruption and gangland wars an equally marvelous real-life saga was unfolding. The script of both fiction and real-life changed every day. "It was," as Hoskins said, "like stepping into Aladdin's cave. "I didn't know what the fuck was going on," he laughs. "'Nobody had a script except Francis, so the crew had to have every single scene in the film set up every morning. Then Coppola'd walk in and say 'I wanna do that scene' - so nobody could take over the film because only he had the script." Hoskins' sidekick was his fictional second-in-command Frenchie, played by Fred Gwynne, a gangling, droll stage actor best known for his TV characterisation Herman Munster. "I couldn't have been more impressed if it had been Marlon Brando," says Hoskins, an ardent Munsters fan. As the financial chaos escalated and the scripts kept changing, Hoskins and Gwynne saw a lot of one another, but rarely in front of the camera. They waited around for weeks. They swapped jokes, philosophy, stories, and emerged with enough twisted wire hangers to start an art exhibition. Gradually they began to take control. They ended up ignoring the scripts and improvised their scenes together. "Imagine me and Fred sitting around in this white room for 14 hours a day just waiting for something to happen. I got really depressed. I gained about three stone, eating hamburgers and drinking beer all the time - we were all blowing out of our costumes just sitting there," he grins. One day he heard tales of Apocalypse Now from three actors who had spent 18 months on full wages without stepping in front of a camera. "Me and Fred," roars Hoskins, "we were the lucky ones!" Hoskins had time to prepare and research his part. He met surviving gangsters and hookers who remembered the real Owney Madden. He had killed three people when he was 17, ruled the New York trade in bootleg beer during the Twenties, and ran the Cotton Club's shows by Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and other black artists. It was startling stuff. But real life on the set kept intervening. He recalls how the movie finally finished shooting by Christmas Eve 1983, and he was at last able to escape back to London. But like a vampire, the film rose from the dead. News arrived that he was needed for more shooting back in New York. He refused to go. Then one day Joey Cusumano, the heavyweight representative of the movie's Las Vegas financiers, arrived in London and invited Hoskins and his wife out to dinner. Was Hoskins going to be on that plane? "Yeah, I'm gonna be!" he laughed. He had received an offer he could not refuse. By the time the movie was released in the US one thing was clear. For all the razzamatazz of The Cotton Club, for all its stars, music, dancing girls and glittering set-pieces, for all the crew of Oscars, Tonies, and Pulitzers, its freshest moments are very simple and old-fashioned. Hoskins and Gwynne take the screen like some gangsterized version of Laurel and Hardy. They improvised using just a prop (a favourite watch) or a setting (a urinal); they deliver routines timed to a vaudeville split-second that would please audiences from Radio City Music Hall to the Finsbury Park Empire. BACK ON THE RESERVATION ... "The Cockney? He's a Red Indian, isn't he, just being shipped off to reservations: Thamesmead, Basingstoke . . . all those poxy holes. London's being carved up for the posh . . . " Hoskins wasn't exactly born in a true cockney part of town, but his rage at the carve-up still comes out. At one point, he says, he was tempted to join the Communist Party. "But I suppose the reason I've never joined a party is that basically, emotionally and intellectually, I'm an anarchist. I realised that pretty early on." His use of language expresses the outrage he feels. It's very different from telly's Chirpy Cockney. It's not Minder-smart, or Chas and Dave singalong, or BBC gor-blimey-guv. The accent is tricky. At first it sounds almost an everyday accent. But as you listen more you realise his strength: he can modulate it carefully so that he holds back power or can wrench phrases into different meanings. In the new Terry Gilliam film Brazil, Hoskins plays a cameo part as a state heating engineer, and makes a line like "Who fixes your ducts?" sound like the nastiest threat you've heard. He can gut his speech of all those insipid Home Counties phrases or even cockney quaintness. Like Stephen Berkoff, he manages to make English sound like some Red Indian tongue, stripped of its beige tones and modern veneer of politeness. He makes it sound raucous, lewd, proud and dangerous. He says he owes a lot of it to Mr. Jones, his old English teacher. Hoskins didn't like school, but he still has a drink with the man who instilled in him a love for language that he never lost. But Hoskins grabbed his lessons when and where he could. After only three years acting he found himself on stage with Sir John Gielgud. It was a 40 minute scene in which Hoskins had all the lines. But he was having difficulty getting a laugh from a line which he knew should be funny. On stage one night, Gielgud whispered when the line came up for Hoskins to step back two paces and count to two. It worked. He got a round of applause. The audience fell about. "I got a round every night," says Hoskins, "and I can't for the life of me figure out why. But everything I've done since, I've stepped back two paces, counted two - and got fuck all!" DEFINITELY NOT THE NEW MICHAEL CAINE When I saw Hoskins in Dublin he was working his last week before taking a break for the first time in three years. He'd acted in Sydney, New York, Mexico City, London and Rome; he'd sang, danced, shaved his head, put on wigs, been covered in blood for movies, telly, theatre; he'd coped with crazy co-productions, crazy Italians, crazy New Yorkers, crazy mobsters; in hotels round the globe he'd watched Richard Briers in dubbed versions of The Good Life so many times he'd become a devoted fan. But Hoskins had nothing fixed for the future, though he was, to use his own phrase, game as a peanut. His wife was having a baby, and he was going to spend some time at home. He didn't really know what he'd do next, but he wasn't really bothered. He'd just do whatever sounded good since he'd never thought of the game in terms of ambition or a career. So there he was - in Dublin's botanical gardens surrounded by exotic flora and fauna playing second fiddle to a drop of water falling onto a leaf. The camera registered his expressions as the drips plopped down. It was for a short comedy film entitled The Woman Who Married Clark Gable, and Hoskins was the husband. Of course the gag was that he looked nothing like the lanky Hollywood heart-throb. His stuck-on pencil moustache was peeling up at the edges as if protesting at the very thought. But Hoskins, the star of the show, didn't seem to mind. He just enjoyed getting on with everybody. The difference between him and Michael Caine, he explained, was that Michael was so good-looking that he was perceived as a threat and people wanted to knock him out. "But me, short, five-foot-six and cubic, with a face like the back of a bus, I'm no threat to anybody." It all sounded very ominous. Was this the screen tough guy we'd seen swathed in blood, flashing that grin, and looking like he enjoyed every minute of it? No threat to anybody? Perhaps times change. Perhaps everybody gets mellow. After all, stranger things have happened. Hoskins still gets mail from the Kray twins, for example. But nowadays Reggie wants him to do a cookery book with him. Back in Finsbury Park, that must be as good as winning an Oscar.
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