If it weren't for the guns, Bob Hoskins might have become an Israeli. In the early 1960s, the archetypal London tough of movies like The Long Good Friday and Mona Lisa spent six months on Kibbutz Yagur near Haifa. It was a wonderful time for the young socialist, driving his tractor and enjoying the communal life. To stay longer, though, he was told he would have to pick up a gun.

After an inept and reluctant appearance on a rifle range, he returned to Britain and became an actor instead.

Strange, then, that the youthful peacenik should have come to prominence as a movie tough guy, administering and receiving beatings and bullets. "You wouldn't want to see me with a real gun," says Hoskins. "I'd be much more dangerous than I am in the films."

Hoskins returned to Israel for a brief visit last month for the screening of his latest film, The Secret Agent, at the Jerusalem International Film Festival at the Cinematheque. The film, which Hoskins also produced, is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's classic novel.

The 54-year-old actor's visit came just after his latest run on stage in London's West End, which also allowed him to draw on his Israel experience. As a Holocaust survivor in Old Wicked Songs, Hoskins was called upon to recount an episode from the camps. The tale he told was one he had heard from a survivor on the kibbutz. "It was an awful, awful story, and it still has such a powerful effect," says Hoskins. "I just remembered that man telling me about what happened to him, in a very matter-of-fact way, but with such force."

Though his name may not be one of the first that comes to mind when the glamor of Hollywood is mentioned, Hoskins is the kind of movie actor who has been in more big films and is better known than you might think. A brief list: The Cotton Club, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Hook, Super Mario Brothers, Zulu Dawn.

While movie stars, in the flesh, usually disappoint or thrill their fans to excess in casual meetings, it's not so with Hoskins. On a brief stroll around Jerusalem, he draws the curious glances of people who seem quite shocked by just how much he is like the man on the screen Ñ short and bulky, close-cropped hair and slow, calm swagger.

"I'm very ordinary," says Hoskins. "I think that's why it's worked, this acting thing. This bloke came up to me in London and said, 'Bob, you've got to have a word with the wife, 'cause she's really getting out of hand...' Then he stopped and he was quite embarrassed because he only realized at that moment that he didn't actually know me. Of course, by then I really wanted to go round and sort his wife out, you know. People tend to look at me and think I' m just like them."

The rough edges of the men Hoskins plays, however, hide someone with a good deal more intelligence. He has been a film writer and director (The Raggedy Rawney) and is writing another script at the moment. He has played with the National Theater in London and the Royal Shakespeare Company. At a joint press conference in Jerusalem to promote The Secret Agent, a radio reporter turned from the cultivated and literate (and upper-class) director Christopher Hampton and asked Hoskins if he had actually read Conrad's book before making the film. Hoskins gave him the Hoskins stare - head tilted to the side on his thick neck and eyes narrow, intense and bad - and snapped back that "It wasmy idea to make the film in the first place."

The Secret Agent is the story of a pornography dealer in Victorian London who becomes involved with anarchist organizations, on which he is paid to inform by the Russian government. The dealer, played by Hoskins, finds himself caught in a terrible cycle of death and political double- dealing that has tragic consequences for his family.

It's a measure of Hoskins's success that, as producer, he can put together such a high-profile list of actors for a relatively small $7 million film. Directed and adapted for the screen by Hampton, who won an Oscar for the screenplay to Dangerous Liaisons, The Secret Agent's cast includes Robin Williams, Gerard Depardieu and Patricia Arquette, as well as a host of British character actors.

It has been a long road to that kind of influence for Hoskins, and an unexpected one. In 1968, he accompanied an actor friend to an audition. His friend went up to the audition, while Hoskins waited in the bar below, "putting a few away." The director of the play came down to the bar and, assuming Hoskins was waiting to try out for a role, invited him to audition. Hoskins obliged "because I'd put so many away, probably" - and got the part.

In his first decade as an actor, Hoskins worked mostly on the stage, winning plaudits for his Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls and as Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi. His break before a broader audience came with Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven in the late 1970s and his starring role as a London gangster in The Long Good Friday.

Hoskins went on to try his hood persona in Hollywood. His performance in Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club was one of the few worthwhile elements of a very trite flick. He truly "arrived" as a film actor in Neil Jordan's 1986 movie Mona Lisa, in which he touchingly played a simple, small-time racist who falls for a black prostitute.

As with the pornographer of The Secret Agent, many of Hoskins' s major roles have seen him finding the sympathetic corners of rather nasty characters. "It's not an actor's job to judge the character he's playing," says Hoskins. "The camera can read your mind. If you're thinking something, it'll show."

That empathy, perhaps, is rooted in the common touch that made him the face of British Telecom TV ads in Britain and that attracted him to the film in which he acted most recently.

In 24:07 Hoskins plays a Nottingham "compulsive social worker" who runs a boxing club. The film, which is currently being edited, is directed by a 24-year-old from Nottingham's tough council estates, Shane Meadows.

Hoskins was told before reading the script that Meadows wrote the role for him. That sent out warning signals, as Hoskins says, because "I get that all the time. The Long Good Friday rears its head about three times a week." But the freshness of the script and the down-to- earth nature of the young director appealed to Hoskins. "Shane told me, 'I've had some offers from Hollywood, '" says Hoskins, moving into the broadest of Nottinghamshire accents, "'but what do I need it for. I mean, me, I'm on ? a week now, like.'"

"I said to him" - and we're back with Hoskins's natural London lingo - "You've got a bit to learn there, haven't you, my lad?"

And Bob Hoskins would certainly be the one to teach him.

Copyright 1997 Jerusalem Post. All Rights Reserved