Bob Hoskins brings true grit to his work as an actor. Back Stage West recently sat down with the Cockney actor to talk about his career and what has shaped his craft. Most formative, he will readily admit, was the decade or so after he dropped out of school at the age of 15 and wandered about taking odd jobs. Eventually, Hoskins accidentally stumbled into acting at the age of 25, and soon found himself performing in prestigious productions at London's Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Globe Theatre. His stage successes from that time included Veterans alongside Sir John Gielgud and Sir John Mills, and Pygmalion with Diana Rigg and Alex McCowan. In 1996, Hoskins returned to the London stage after a 15-year absence to star in Jon Marans' Old Wicked Songs. Hoskins made his screen breakthrough in 1977 with Dennis Potter's BBC miniseries Pennies From Heaven, which earned him a best actor BAFTA nomination. A few years later, Hoskins gained international attention for his performance as crime lord Harold Shand in John MacKenzie's violent gangster film The Long Good Friday. He followed that in 1986 with another outstanding performance in Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa, for which he received an Oscar nomination and best actor awards from the New York Critics' Circle, the Golden Globes, and the Cannes Film Festival. His other screen credits include Pink Floyd--The Wall, The Cotton Club, Brazil, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Hook, Nixon, Michael, and The Secret Agent. Hoskins has also directed two features, The Raggedy Rawney and The Rainbow. Currently, he stars in the gritty black-and-white film TwentyFourSeven, the debut feature by Shane Meadows. With humor, depth, and humanity, the 55-year-old Hoskins expertly portrays Alan Darcy, a loner obsessed with restoring dignity to a town's dissolute youth by starting up a boxing club. BSW: The majority of your co-stars in TwentyFourSeven were non-professional actors. How did you find the experience of working among them? Hoskins: It was extraordinary. There was no space for any fancy footwork or for me being a clever actor. With these guys, if it didn't come from the heart, then nobody was listening. This film means more to me than anything I've ever done. I'm not only proud of it, but it's a part of me. My best is on that screen, I think. BSW: Is it vital for you to feel a continual sense of growth as an actor? Hoskins: Yes. I love the whole process. Drama is about extreme private moments, and to go through these moments, for me, it's therapy. To actually go through something and turn in the same old performance, get your check and go home--I couldn't live like that. It would bore me silly. I love it too much. BSW: I understand that you stumbled into acting. Could you share that story? Hoskins: A friend of mine went to an audition at this amateur theatre and I went with him. We were going to go to a party afterwards. I waited in the bar while my friend was auditioning upstairs and someone came down and said, "You're next," and I said, "All right, fine." I went upstairs and they said, "Here's the script. We'll read through it." Then they said, "No, no--out loud." So I read the part and this fellow offered me the lead in the play. The first night, Sarah Randall, the agent, came backstage and said, "Look, you've got to take this up professionally." I said, "Get us a job and I will." She was a literary agent and she put me on to a theatrical agent, and he sent me up for three auditions and I got all three of them. After that I was a professional actor. One of the reasons I went along with it was because I thought it would be a good excuse for being out of work. Usually when you're out of work, people call you a layabout and get aggressive with you. But with an actor, people feel sympathy and say, "You're resting." But then, I never got a chance to be out of work! BSW: Before you became an actor you worked a lot of odd jobs, such as a chimney sweep, a nightclub bouncer, a fruit picker on an Israeli kibbutz. I even read somewhere that you were a fire eater in a circus. Is that really true? Hoskins: Yeah, but that was when I was an actor. A friend of mine was in a circus and said, "Would you want to be in the circus for a season?" and I said, "Yeah, I'll have some of that." They taught me how to do a fire-eating act and I was a ringmaster and clown. It was great. BSW: What were some of the other professions you were employed in? Hoskins: When I left school, I was a clerk and a trainee commercial artist, but it bored the life out of me. Then I was a navvy for a while, digging the roads. I was Covent Garden porter in the fruit and flower market. I joined the Norwegian Merchant Navy for two weeks and went to Amsterdam and met a stripper called Maylou, and when you're 17 years of age and a Maylou walks in your life, you jump ship. Then I was window cleaner, a stable jack--all kinds of odd jobs. Then my dad got me a job in his firm and I studied to be an accountant for three years. One Monday morning all these certificates came through the door saying I was halfway there and I thought, I'm halfway to being all the people I hate. I left and I just went on the bum, started traveling around the Middle East. I wound up in a kibbutz in Israel and I would have been happy doing that, but they said, "If you're going to stay, you have to join the army," and I said, "Forget it, I'm out." So I had to come back to England, and when I came back, I became an actor. BSW: You were only acting for a couple years before you were up onstage with legendary thespians like Sir John Geilgud. Was that an intimidating time for you? Hoskins: No, not really. I just wound up working all the time. Working with Gielgud was just another job. And then I was making movies and television, and it was just another job. Then I looked in my bank account, and I couldn't believe it! Funnily enough, I always thought people like me got put away eventually. They couldn't actually allow me running around the streets. I'm too much of a lunatic. But then I came into this business and I realized that's where they put us. We're all crazy, but wonderfully mad. BSW: Did you ever get training as an actor? Hoskins: None at all. In the beginning, I was told, "You're going to have take elocution lessons and deportment classes, and you're going to have to learn to do everything that you don't do." And I said, "Wait a minute, hang on. I'm going to learn to talk like I don't, walk like I don't, be like I'm not? Who the fuck am I in the middle of this?" So I said, "No." Actually, I learned to act by watching women. BSW: Women? Hoskins: Women. I discovered pretty quickly that when you're suddenly earning your living as an actor, you better find out how to do it and what it's about. I realized that drama is about private moments. You go and see things on a stage that people normally don't show you. That's what an actor does. I realized that watching men is a waste of time, because they never show anything. There's just a wall. I suppose because women have had to keep their mouths shut for thousands of years that they express themselves more. A woman gives birth and that day she picks that baby up and says, "Welcome," she expresses herself to that child. I watched my mom. I watched women with kids. I watched all kinds of women and the way they express and how they react to things. It's got something to do with directness. Men only do it very seldom in private. BSW: Do you have a process of preparing for roles? Hoskins: It's just a thought process. I don't spend a lot of time studying the script. I just read the script and get the character and probably learn my lines as I'm walking toward the set. But I spend an awful lot of time thinking about it and trying to find the basis of who the character is. As long as you have a solid basis of who you are, you start to think in the character's voice and in the character's accent and it becomes a reality. BSW: You took a 15-year hiatus from doing theatre. Why so long? Hoskins: It wasn't a question of not wanting to do it. It's just that I never got offered anything I wanted to do. It was like, Do me a favor, I've done this already and you want me to bore myself for six months doing it again? Forget it. But this play turned up, Old Wicked Songs, and it was a part that no one would ever offer me-- an old Viennese music professor who is an ex-Holocaust victim. I did it, but I was absolutely terrified. It was like going in front of a firing squad. But once I was on, it was great. What was wonderful was that I go in front of cameras and do my shtick, but I got onstage and I started doing things and thought, Wait a minute. That doesn't work now. I'm 30 years older. And I started to find that being an older man, I had other things to do and other things that the audience responded to. So it was great to actually get back in touch with me. BSW: What have been the highlights of your career? Hoskins: I think one highlight was during Old Wicked Songs. There was an old woman behind the stage after the show. The doorman phoned up and said, "I've got a very old lady down here who says she knows you." So I said, "Send her up." She must have been in her 90s. She said (Hoskins breaks into a German accent), "I knew your mother. I knew your father. I knew them all. I was in Dachau with your sister." She actually saw me as my character. I didn't know how to say to her, "Look, I'm a Cockney from London, and I'm not even Jewish." I took her out for dinner, this old lady who felt that she had to tell me about what happened to my family. That was a highlight. BSW: I have one last question. What advice would you offer a young actor? Hoskins: The
biggest enemy to any actor is vanity. If you're thinking about what you look like in front
of an audience, you're presenting a barrier between your soul and the audience. Get rid of
vanity, because it will destroy you. BS
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