Bob Hoskins, with his performance in 'Mona Lisa', was the first British actor since Terence Stamp to win the Best Actor award at Cannes.

'I shared it with this little fat French fella called Michel Blanc.'

'Michel Blanc? Michael White!'

'Yeah. Michael White. Yeehahhh. This French geezer, Michel Blanc, he was little and bald as a coot, worse than me. Thing is though, Steve, ever since Cannes everything has been goin' fucking mad. I'm bein' offered the lot, houses wiv swimmin' pools, a million quid if I wanted it, enough money to set me up for life. That's what happens with Cannes. It's not the Oscars but it rates and if someone wins best actor whose got an English or American accent, which in my case I just about have, yeeehahhh, well, the sky's the limit.

'So now I have to have time to myself, to think, to consider, you know, is this what I really want wiv my life? Do I want that for my two kids who are just about getting near school age, do I want to bring them up in a place like LA, do I want to leave my mates and my family to do stuff that might not be as good as what-I've done already, do I want to lose control over myself at a time when I've started to find that very thing... I haven't worked since 'Mona Lisa' do you know that, I feel... what's the word...?'

'Satisfied.'

'No.'

'Drained.'

'No.'

'Expressed.'

'Yeah... Do you know, this part is the best fucking thing I have ever done. I'm so proud of what I've achieved here I can't tell you. If I popped off tomorrow, I would feel that I'd left something behind that was worth it.'

CROSSROADS

The last occasion that Bob Hoskins and I sat down together to do an interview was in March, 1982. That was another crossroad - for us too, the interview being the magazine's first recorded use of colour - as Hoskins had already tasted fame and recognition and was obviously waiting to see what life and his agent were going to bring him. His role as London gangster Harold Shand in John McKenzie and Barry Keeffe’s ‘The Long Good Friday’ had won him a Standard award; his performance as Arthur Parker in Dennis Potter's 'Pennies From Heaven' had brought household TV recognition, and he was about to star in his first musical, as Nathan Detroit in the National Theatre's now celebrated production of 'Guys and Dolls'.

On the domestic front things were less settled: he was broke, temporarily homeless and living in one room in a teachers' commune, as he described it, in Hampstead with his then girlfriend Linda. His relations with his first wife were the subject of Sunday paper allegations of violence and cruelty. Things were so cool that letters to her were signed: 'Yours, R Hoskins'.

Four years on, lots has changed. Hoskins looks slicker, more prosperous. He has his own house in Islington. Linda, his wife, and their two young kids Rosa, three, and Jack, 18 months, have 'transformed' his life. His kids from his first marriage are rapidly approaching the age when they can visit and know and judge their father independent of past acrimonies. 'Linda is the most explosive thing that’s ever happened to me. When I did that interview with you I’d just met her. It was round that time. Well, what she’s done for me is impossible to encapsulate, but being with her has made me centred. She’s a remarkable woman in her own right, very bright. To tell you the truth I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she doesn’t start giving a few producers a run for their money, one day soon. What with Puttnam leaving the country.'

On a professional note, Hoskins's relationship with his other female guru, his agent and friend, Sally Hope, has terminated suddenly after more than ten years of close association. 'When someone has controlled your life for so long and has enabled you to reach the point where you have to be and can be free then it's hard, but it's one of those things.'

Now, with the Cannes prize under his belt, he finds himself about to burst on to the British cinema scene with two movie premieres in two weeks. 'Mona Lisa', co-written and directed by the prodigious Neil Jordan, opens at the beginning of September. In it Hoskins plays the deeply, but improbably, appealing character of George, a rather cheap bodyguard to an upmarket, half-caste, freelance tart with whom he becomes besotted. His mate Michael Caine has a delightful supporting role as a decidedly slimy London villain called Mortwell. Caine agreed to do the part for a modest fee and no star billing, largely on the strength of his friendship with fellow North Lunnuner Hoskins. ‘He turned up on the first day and said to me, "I bet you never thought I'd do it, you cunt!" ' Hoskins showed him the script when thev were working on 'Sweet Liberty', Alan Alda's comedy in which BH plays a neurotic Jewish screenwriter to Caine's 'recreation of Errol Flynn'.

THE COMMON MAN

Last year was a heavy year for Hoskins, in fact he calculates that in the last four he's spent no more than four months at his home in North London. 'Linda and the kids come too, which helps but that's gonna have to stop soon. Obviously, because what comes first is their education.'

Mind you, for 'Mona Lisa', Hoskins was able to utilise the help of his three-year-old daughter Rosa whom he took on regular visits to the zoo.

'You see what I had about George was this bloke who's an ordinary geezer, but who's got a deep sense of decency, a bloke who's there when he is needed, who doesn't welch, who reveals that sense of right and wrong that is there in most of us when it comes down to it. It would be in you, I know, if you were put to the test. I see myself as a cheerleader for the common man after that film because people like George may not have any style, may not have much sophistication or intellect, but they are the kind of people who built London, built New York. George is a hero, a lonely guy with a great light that is waiting to burst out. So I took my kid to the zoo to look at all those caged, trapped beasts, all those birds, the birds in particular, waiting to fly. Wanting to fly.'

Drivers, whores, sleazy city scenes, low-lifes, villains. 'Mona Lisa' could be described as a London answer to Martin Scorsese's and Paul Schrader's unforgettable essay of boho extremis, 'Taxi Driver.' Certainly themes and scenes coincide and collide: the nightmare clouds of Second Avenue and the raucous Kings Cross viaducts, the sleaze holes where teenage sex is bartered, the backseats where a crazed husband may fantasise about shooting his errant wife 'in the pussy' with a magnum, or a hooker may reveal how she got out of the streetwalking circuit and still longs to save a colleague from drugs, sex and crime.

But ultimately, there is a lot of difference between Hoskins’s George and De Niro's Travis Bickle, between Jordan’s London and Scorsese’s New York. Travis may be a Vietnam vet ready to cure the city of its slime, but he is no Everyman, no implicit nice, ordinary guy. ‘George is hardly waiting to explode like the character in "Taxi Driver". Most of his violence is retroactive, defensive, he's no one-man samurai machine.

'When Neil first brought the script - he sent it actually - I said that it was OK but not for me, then this scruffy little Irishman turns up on my doorstep one day and says "What didn't you like about my script then?" so I said "Come in and have a drink and I'll tell you."

'When he wrote it originally it was too much of a thriller, and it had too much violence in it. I said that I wanted the relationship between the driver and the girl to be developed more. And the relationship between George and his daughter who is growing up and is optimistic, the contrast between his relationship with a whore and with his kid, who he really cares for. That's important. To have a kid you can care for is important. If you don't care for anyone it's worse, far worse, than not having anyone who cares for you.

'What really appeals to me about George is that the guy is a mug. I think he's the ultimate hero because he's not invincible. He wears his heart on his sleeve, he's totally emotional, and he cannot help getting involved. The interest for me is the loser learning. George is a loser, but he learns very painfully.'

George learns like Travis Bickle learns: Travis that he will always be too ugly to be a Kris Kristofferson, too gross for romance; George, that for Simone the whore, splendidly played by Cathy Tyson, he is another punter and no more, a punter that can be cajoled (conned?) into helping one dyke rescue another dyke which is a fair approximation of the relationship between Simone and her vanished protégé, Cathy. 'Mona Lisa' is all about the reality behind the advert - how somewhere between love and madness lies obsession. Its weaknesses lie (yet again for a British movie), in its conspiratorial picture of sadistic, sexy Soho, ministers of the crown and white-slave rings. It's an excessive, unconvincing and unnecessary layer - but it does nothing to diminish the thrust of Hoskins's performance.

POTENTIAL CAGNEY

I once described him as a potential Cagney with that ability - remember the 'Your ma's dead' sequence in 'White Heat'? - to sprint from a standing start. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the scene in 'Mona Lisa' on Brighton pier where Hoskins moves from choked rejection to violent rage within moments. His virtues as an actor have always been that ability to contain geniality and suffering, naivety and naked aggression within the same diminutively impressive frame. When he played Bosola in Adrian Noble's 'The Duchess of Malfi' you could tell that here was someone who could have come straight from the galleys; his Iago was another one of those inspired Everymans, this time warped and twisted into demonic, psychopathic evil, but an Iago with recognisable dust on his hands in Jonathan Miller's production. All bad to the all good of his performance in JB Priestley's 'Sheppey' on TV, a man so good that his family want to commit him for insanity. Or his roles both as Harold Shand in the film of 'The Long Good Friday' and George in 'Mona Lisa', people with a mixture of good and evil, energy and sloth, righteousness and moral despair, only waiting for the situation to push the winners of each bout inside the brain to the fore.

For 'Sweet Liberty' Hoskins and family were put up in Long Island for their stay, superstars tasting the good life of America as never before. Hoskins actually appeared on stage with his hero Bob Dylan and with Richard Gere, an old colleague from 'The Cotton Club' at one charity benefit.

'The Cotton Club', Hoskins's first break into the Hollywood big time came in typically inauspicious circumstances. 'I got this call in the middle of the night. The voice said: "This is Francis Coppola, I want you to do a movie of mine." I said: "Oh really. Well I'm Henry the Eighth and you've just woken up my kid, you cunt," so that started out well. But he rang back. I know there were rumours that we didn't hit it off but I liked working with Francis. If he'd have been left alone it would have been a classic movie, but he got fucked up by Robert Evans the producer, who brought in a lot of weird gangsterish people and interfered too much.

'I spent eight months in New York, which was too much, even though I liked the city it was too much, I couldn't live there and Linda and the kids were with me in this part of the Village where we were getting hassled by a lot of weirdos, you know. I told them that I was worried about Linda and the kids and this guy said that I shouldn't worry because everyone knew where they were at any one time.'

Hoskins says that one abiding relationship did come out of it, his friendship with Fred 'Herman Munster' Gwynne with whom, as the British-born gangster Owney Madden, he struck up a relationship both on and off-screen. ‘Fred and I made up our own scenes virtually, and I know that I got a lot of good notices from that film directly as a result of what Fred did - like the scene with the watch, when he's taken hostage and he smashed the watch I have because he thinks I only paid five hundred dollars for him and then he gives me a platinum watch when I tell him the ransom was fifty grand. That was all Fred's idea - he even got into trouble for smashing up the watch 'cos it was really very valuable. But Fred was brilliant.'

A MILLION QUID

In the last year, as well as 'Mona Lisa' and 'Sweet Liberty', Hoskins has played the part of Mussolini for a series on Italian TV, has completed 'The Dunera Boys' for the box in Australia, an excellent short, 'The Woman Who Married Clark Gable', in Ireland and has even found time to finish his own script, 'The Raggedy Rawney', ostensibly about gypsies in the last war but essentially about the subject of pacifism in general. Hoskins calls it a 'bit of a saga' and, like the hero of 'Mona Lisa' and his only real mate, played by the ubiquitous heavy Robert Coltrane (Robbie to you), Hoskins loves a good tale - he got the idea for the film from one of his mum's stories and landed the part in 'Pennies From Heaven' by impressing director Ken Trodd with his narrative skills.

'I'm probably gonna star and direct it as well to save dough - do it in Czechoslovakia. It's cheap and the light is very special there, something about spaces that are very landlocked, the light is very subtle. That's in May next year.’

Hoskins reckons that the only thing that's wrong with British films is the dearth of really good producers: 'I have to say that Dennis O'Brien of Handmade was brilliant in raising the money for 'Mona Lisa', but the real genius was Patrick Cassavetti. He brought the film in a hundred grand under budget.'

But the call of America still lures this very special actor. He's already due to sign for 'Strange Hearts', to be directed by Louis Malle and filmed in New York where he went almost daft hanging about for nearly a year when 'Cotton Club' was being delayed. 'I've been offered everything in my time, drugswise, especially where we were staying in New York. When I was at the National I always used to attract the skinheads, it's me haircut and the accent. All the gluesniffers, always throwing bags of solvent at me, but who needs it?'

And, though he's more fulfilled domestically and professionally, one can't help feeling that all the old turmoil - the sheer intelligence and honesty which makes Hoskins not only such an endearing, knockabout feller but an actor of special integrity, joviality, vulnerability is still intact. He worries a lot. The violence within him explodes less often now. The fear of failure is less, the confidence booming, but...'Look, when you've reached a certain plateau, when you've done something which you are this proud of, then you have to say to people "Give me a rest". I want a rest, Steve, I have to decide what I want to do and whether I really want to price myself out of the world market which is what you do when you go the States and take the big house with the big pool. I mean what is a million quid for - what's it for!? And do I really need to do another part, no matter how good, which is basically no different from what I've already done? The only reason I haven't done any stage work recently is because I haven't been offered anything decent, anything that is really any more than watered-down versions of past stuff. So really, where do I go from here?'

When Hoskins was playing the affable scene-stealing Madden in 'Cotton Club', he would take trips down to the Hells Kitchen district of New York where Madden grew up and prospered. 'He was a fine, intelligent man: a villain but a great humanitarian. Lots of people didn't starve in the Depression because of his kindnesses. An artist, an immensely clever businessman. Another common hero. Someone who comes out of the pack but who's a bit special.

'You see, I love the ordinary folks who come up to me and they say, "I like you, Bob." And what they mean is, and they say that too, "I like you Bob, you do good films." That's what is really great, knowing that the bloke in the street and his missus has gone to see me on Saturday night after a week doing some shit job. That's nice. That I haven't let 'em down. But then if I'm gone - once I'm not there any more there's no responsibility, is there?'

'Mona Lisa' is already a surprisingly big success at the American box-office even for its youthfully lugubrious coproducer, Stephen Woolley, who beckoned me to the preview of the film with his now famous verbal guide to fun: 'Expect rubbish, expect disappointment, and you might have a rewarding time.'

I didn't, I didn't, but I did. Know wot I mean?