The secret is in the kerosene.

Bob Hoskins is giving fire-breathing lessons. When he was in his late 20s, he worked a summer at a circus as a clown, a ringmaster and a fire-eater. At 57, he's a little rusty with the fire act. But trust him, it's like riding a bicycle.

"You fill your mouth up with paraffin," he explains in his thick, Northern London cockney. "You make up sort of a spray. And that blows fire. It's a great effect. Forget having a sex life. Because you stink."

For the better part of 25 years, Bob Hoskins has been breathing fire as an actor. Not the paraffin milkshake kind, but the snaky, Mephistophelean gangsters of the sort that Edward G. Robinson used to play. Hoods with soul ("The Long Good Friday," "Mona Lisa"). Or luminaries without it, like J. Edgar Hoover ("Nixon") or Benito Mussolini (HBO's "Mussolini and I").

Hoskins's flame is on a low setting for his new movie, "Felicia's Journey," but the effect is, if anything, even creepier. In Atom Egoyan's disturbing adaptation of a 1994 novel by William Trevor, Hoskins pulls off a tour de force of underplaying as Joseph Ambrose Hilditch, a good-hearted factory catering manager who clandestinely aids young women in trouble and then snuffs them out. For a film riddled with Hitchcockian humor and psychological suspense, his characterization is appropriately reminiscent of Hitchcock himself: courtly, portly, simmering with dark fantasies surrounding the opposite sex.

The darkest fantasy that Hoskins can muster about his beloved wife, Linda, is that she might find out he's sneaking cigarettes before his interviews. ("Don't put it in the article, my old lady'll have my head.") And unlike the retiring Hilditch, whose repressions stem from a forlorn childhood, the jocular, expletive-spouting actor recalls a happy upbringing.

Hoskins was born in 1942 in Suffolk, England, the only son of bookkeeper and a cook whose maiden name, by coincidence, was Hopkins. It was the thick of the blitz. "When my mother was pregnant with me and there was the threat of an air raid, they evacuated her from North London to Suffolk. When I was 2 months old and the bombs were behind they sent us back again. And I spent the first three years of my childhood under a table, during the air raids."

He would spend the following 10 years ducking the verbal volleys of his teachers, who were less than supportive of the plucky Hoskins. By 15, he quit school. "Hated it," he recalls bluntly. "Don't know that they liked me much either."

Hoskins departure from the educational system initiated an itinerant career journey, beginning as a trainee clerk in commercial art. Quickly bored with that, he left to join the Norwegian Navy ("I fancied being a Viking") in pursuit of foreign-legion style adventure. His life as a seaman lasted all of two weeks, when he made the acquaintance of a stripper named Malu.

So Malu led young Robert astray?

"No," he says with a broad grin that fills in the rest. "She led me exactly where I wanted to go!"

After three misbegotten years studying to be an accountant, a disgusted Hoskins fled to Israel. "One Monday morning all these certificates came through the door saying I was halfway to being everybody I hated. So I hitched around the Middle East, just bumming around with the Arabs. I was on a kibbutz for six months -- I was going to become a kibbutznik, but they said you have to join the Army. I said, 'I'm not Jewish.' And they said, 'If you're going to live in a country you have to defend it.' And I thought, no way. I'm not going out there with a gun. 'Cause they got bigger guns than me!"

One afternoon back in England, Hoskins was hanging out in a theater bar where they were auditioning actors upstairs for an amateur production. "They came down and said, 'You're next.' And they gave me the lead in the play. The first night an agent came and said, 'You've got to take this up professionally.' I said, 'Get us a job and I will.' I went for three auditions, and I got all three of them."

Whatever acting education Hoskins has had has come from two surprising sources. "I realized that men are completely dishonest emotionally. They don't show a thing. So I started watching women. Just watching women. A woman has emotional honesty. It's got nothing to do with femininity. A typical example. You come home, dinner's laid out, champagne, the whole thing, she's done up, looking beautiful. But she's angry. There's no way you don't know. With a guy, three weeks later maybe, she'll have to say, 'What's wrong with you? Well, why are you telling me now?'

"And I learned to develop by reading the critics. It's pointless asking another actor. (He hooks into a gushing, actor-y voice.) 'Wonderful, darling! Absolutely wonderful!' Yeah, thanks. I even read the bad critics, just to see what's in fashion."

Formally speaking, Hoskins never has had an acting lesson. And there is definitely no Method in the madness of his nonstop assignments. "The Method is just a way of looking busy," he says of the internalized acting style made famous by the Group Theatre. "And I certainly don't take my characters home at the end of the day. I couldn't take my characters home to my kids. My bags would be packed and I'd be out the door in a flash."

If there is any shadow in Hoskins' career, it is that he is far more popular in America than in his home country, where he has often been disdained for taking on so many cockney and low-life characters.

"I love Hollywood. It pays you a lot of money, makes you very famous, and treats you like the Crown Jewels. England is a funny place. It does have a class system. It does become wearying that whenever you walk into a room and open your mouth and out comes a cockney accent, they lock up the silver and send the women upstairs. But I've got enough money in the bank to say . . . "

Bob Hoskins tosses a choice expletive toward the naysayers across the Atlantic, then goes out the door to light up an illicit cigarette.