BOB HOSKINS has lived his life remembering two things his much-loved mother told him when he was a little boy. They are: 'If someone doesn't like you, stuff them. They have no taste.' And: 'Live with your arms wide open. You'll get it on the chin, but you'll have the good bits as well.' It's a black and white approach to life that suits him very well. It's what's made him a great actor, a sometimes tricky person and a curious sex symbol. He is mesmerising on screen. The one-time window cleaner, now international star and multi-millionaire, shot to fame as a gangster in The Long Good Friday and went on to hits such as Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven. His role in Mona Lisa won him an Oscar nomination. Who Framed Roger Rabbit followed. As did those BT adverts. In person he is a curious combination of the tough, uncompromising, vulnerable and passionate. He is quietly spoken and polite, but you would be a fool to ignore the energy below his smiling surface, ready to explode if you stepped out of line. One of the things he can't bear is pretence. He still talks like a rough North Londoner, punctuates almost every sentence with a four-letter word, and holds your eyes in a vice-like grip. His personal life has been volatile. His first marriage ended acrimoniously, he's had a nervous breakdown, not always treated women well, but is now happily married to his second wife Linda. Ask him what have been the highlights of an extraordinary life and he instantly picks three occasions. The first was when he was mistaken for a candidate at an audition he had gone to with an actor friend. The second was seeing Linda across a crowded pub. The third is taking the part of Professor Mashkan in the Pulitzer Prize nominated play by Jon Marans, Old Wicked Songs, previewing at the Old Vic in Bristol before opening soon in the West End. It centres on the relationship between a young, arrogant American pianist and a rather difficult Viennese music professor. It's Bob's first stage part for 15 years and he admits he's terrified. 'It feels like going in front of the firing squad. And when I'm nervous I get a bit fragile and pathetic.' He grins holding out his arms as his mother told him to. 'I say to my wife or the women backstage: 'Give us a cuddle for gawd's sake. I'm going to fall apart.' Luckily they're all cuddlers in my family. 'I feel I've been on hold for this play all my life and think it's the best thing I've ever done. I am Mashkan on stage. Very possibly I have been him in another life. I go through so many emotions in the play that afterwards I'm happy sitting quietly - which is very unusual for me.' His dedication will undoubtedly make for a fine performance, but sometimes Hoskins delves so deeply into the characters he plays that he becomes them outside working hours. He even collapsed under the strain. 'It can make me difficult to live with,' he admits. 'Sometimes I get a bit potty.' He smiles: 'Then I need even more cuddles. Mashkan doesn't have a very nice head to be inside, but I think I'll hang on this time because I'm very secure in my marriage. 'Hopefully he won't invade me as much as my character in Roger Rabbit. Then my imagination got the better of me and I saw weasels coming out of the walls. It screwed my brain up so much my doctor told me to go to bed for five months.' He'd be worse, he tells me, if he didn't act. 'It's therapy for me. There's a lot in me that I need to get out. You wouldn't want to know me if I didn't act.' Despite his work, he admits he loses his temper rather too often. He has no time for people he dislikes or annoy him. 'It can still get me into trouble. Linda gets quite embarrassed when I go for someone. I nearly always regret it afterwards.' He held out his arms again, lifted his eyes heavenwards and became disarmingly sheepish. 'I wish I could behave more wisely.' Hoskins, 54, is 5ft 6in and looks like a bouncer in a distorting mirrors. He was born in 1942 and grew up in a two-bedroom flat in working-class Finsbury Park, North London. His father, Bob was a book-keeper, his mother Elsie, a feisty, larger-than-life character, a nursery school cook. Bob was their only child. Bob hung out in gangs and liked to fight. He left school at 15 with one O-level and sang in a blues group. He then drifted from job to job. He was a porter at the old Covent Garden market, a labourer, lorry-driver, steeplejack and filing clerk. He then did a three-year accountancy course, but the day he passed panicked about the thought of the office life and left the country. He went first to Syria and then worked on an Israeli kibbutz picking mangoes. He came back when the Israeli Army beckoned and soon afterwards met Jane Livesey, a school teacher. They had a son Alexander before they married in 1967. A daughter Sarah followed. Married life didn't start well. Hoskins, then 25, eked out a living as a window cleaner and Alexander was diagnosed as having a degenerative muscle wasting disease. Hoskins life changed dramatically in 1968 with that audition when he was offered the lead in a new play called The Feather Pluckers. 'As soon as I started acting I knew it was for me. I fit into this business like a sore foot into a soft shoe.' He has never been to drama school but learnt his craft by watching women 'they express themselves so much better than men' and reading critics, particularly our much-missed Jack Tinker. 'Actors aren't supposed to like critics, but they became my teachers and I've always read them passionately. I've been wounded but that's part of the creative process.' At first his success went straight to his head. 'I was self-obsessed and totally bound up with myself which meant I treated women and other friends very badly. I won't go into details, but it was just me that counted. I also had very black depressions.' His marriage to Jane fell apart following an affair Hoskins had while on location in South Africa while making Zulu Dawn. In the aftermath Jane accused Hoskins of being violent. Hoskins, talking about her allegations for the first time says: 'I didn't hit her, ever. But it was an awful relationship. I wasn't mature enough to be married - I married her because she'd had my son. We were two people who shouldn't have been together. I was a romantic and she was a quite an intellectual.' She was not, he says, a good cuddler. After the split he had a nervous breakdown. 'It was the most awful time in my life. I had lost my children, everything. I was on my own and needed someone, but I couldn't relate to anybody. ' 'In the end I invented an imaginary friend to help me. I didn't know it at the time, but it was Linda.' He smiles. 'I found her three years before she turned up.' They met on Charles and Diana's wedding day, July 29, 1981 in a pub. Hoskins response was immediate. 'I saw her and thought: 'That'll do me'.' They tied the knot in 1982, have a daughter Rosa 13 and son Jack 11 and live in a tree-lined street in Belsize Park, North London. 'Linda is very funny and has brought out tenderness in me that I didn't have before. I've become less and less moody.' After his marriage to Linda, his career continued to boom. His performance as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls at the Royal National Theatre brought standing ovations. He starred in Hook and Super Mario Brothers, and has directed and starred in his latest movie, The Rainbow. He is so inundated with work that he can command $5 million for a movie. He was paid an estimated $500,000 for the British Telecom adverts and although his particular campaign is over, he can't escape his catch phrase, 'It's good to talk'. 'The bugbear is that now everyone rushes up to me and thinks they are being terribly funny when they shout 'It's good to talk' and dash off again. They never stop to think that I've heard it a thousand times. I've done this whole bloody campaign encouraging people to communicate with each other and now I'm the only one no one talks to.' He held out his arms, put his head on one side and put on an Oscar-winning expression of helplessness. I wanted to - but didn't quite dare - give him a hug. Copyright 1996 Associated Newspapers Ltd. |
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