Bob Hoskins just ignored that actors' axiom about never working with scene-stealing kids or animals. In "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," Hoskins co-stars with a whole bunch of kids (from Baby Herman to Pinocchio) and animals (from Roger Rabbit to Mickey Mouse). What's more, they're cartoon kids and animals.

"I jumped at it," a wide-eyed Hoskins said in Los Angeles last week. "I'm quite a cartoon buff. I love cartoons. For me, it was the job I'd been waiting for all my life -- aw, great!

"A lot of people have worked with Laurence Olivier, but I've actually worked with Bugs Bunny! Daffy Duck! Droopy!"

Hoskins didn't fret about being upstaged by an animated rabbit. Roger and the other animated characters weren't drawn into the picture until after all of Hoskins' scenes were shot.

"The big problem was that I would upstage the rabbit," the stocky Cockney actor said. "Like, an actor fills up the space that's allotted to him -- y'know what I mean? -- on stage or on the screen. And when you're there on your own, you're likely to overcompensate. I had to make sure that, when the rabbit had a gag line, visually the concentration would be on the rabbit. I had to be a bit cartoonish, but if I did too much, it wouldn't work.

"The concentration was a killer, mainly 'cause I had to hallucinate. I saw all the other films, like 'Mary Poppins,' and it doesn't work. You're always aware that the cartoons are cartoons. But in this, I had to make a very solid relationship with Roger."

Hoskins, 45, first made an indelible impression on moviegoers in 1980 as the explosive gangster of "The Long Good Friday." With the slightly pointed ears of a satyr and more hair on his back than on his head, Hoskins tore through the film as if he were the missing link -- a raging primitive unleashed in the modern world of business lunches and trade agreements.

It was the role of a lifetime, a performance of such barely contained power and authenticity that it seemed to many audiences that the actor had come out of nowhere to play this part and this part only.

But Hoskins said he never set out to be an actor. Nor did he ever receive formal training in the profession. He'd worked as a Covent Garden Market porter, a steeplejack, a seaman and a carnival fire-eater. And then, one day he just stumbled into the world of the theater.

"I was in a bar," he said, as if he were indeed sitting in a bar, telling a favorite story. "I was in a bar next to a theater. I didn't realize it. I was drinkin' away and nobody else was drinkin' a lot. I thought, 'A funny bar, this.' Then a guy comes down and says, 'Well, you're next.' I went upstairs and it was an audition for this play. I read this script and got the part. I was just bummin' around at the time."

He's not just bummin' around anymore. Hoskins' thespian occupations the last few years have included playing a duct repairman in "Brazil," an American gangster in "Cotton Club," a priest in "A Prayer for the Dying" and chauffeur to a prostitute in "Mona Lisa." The latter job won him an Oscar nomination. And in the fall, Island Pictures will release "The Raggedy Rawney," which Hoskins both stars in and directs.

In recent films like "Sweet Liberty," "The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," Hoskins has played an American. But that's just acting. Offscreen, he still talks like a Cockney seaman; he hasn't traded in his own Guinness-thick accent for a bland, watered-down American one.

"Accents are a pain, y'know? You can't get on with the job, you gotta do an accent first. It takes time. I really have to work at it."

Nevertheless, Hoskins has mastered a number of them, in movie, stage and television parts from Nathan Detroit in "Guys and Dolls" to the title role in "Richard III." As the Finsbury Park native once told another interviewer: "Ya cawn't be a king wiv an ax-sent lahk this!"

Shifting stylistic gears, from the realism of "Mona Lisa" and "Judith Hearn" to the cartoon fantasy of "Roger Rabbit" is no problem for Hoskins: "Nah, it's just another job. I'm an actor. That's what I get paid for. I dunno, I've never been able to develop a style for myself. Some guys've got style, but I certainly haven't got style -- I'm not a bit stylish," he laughed.

Hoskins' real co-star in "Roger Rabbit" was was someone who never appears onscreen. "The brilliant thing about it -- a big help for me, anyway -- was Charlie Fleischer, who played Roger. We invented this whole new acting technique. Charlie went through exactly the same process that I went through. He insisted on make-up and a costume. And he learned his lines. He wasn't reading it, he was doing it.

"So, he'd be over there by the door and I'd be doing it here. But we were in front of each other. We could have danced, in step, 10 feet away from each other by the end of it. He was Roger Rabbit. He's a comedian, but he's also a fine actor, old Charlie, and he gave an acting performance.

"He used to love this costume with his big ears. He'd go shopping in costume. We had to stop him after a while, 'cause people in the street thought he was nuts. He walked into a pharmacy at one point and there was this woman -- it was in England and she was trying to be very British and not make a comment on this man who's just walked into my shop dressed as a rabbit with big white ears! Ha!"

Hoskins said he spent a lot of time on the set "practicing with the puppeteers or the special effects. Or you would be with the animators, looking at what space you had, what was possible, what you could do. The technicalities of it took up all the time. You didn't have a lot of time to go back and sleep in the caravan.

"There were animators there all the time. We'd put the scene together with the animators, who'd say: `Well, if you do that, then I can't get this.' Ridiculous things like, if I grabbed onto the rabbit around the neck, if I did it like that (with fingers separated), I've just caused four weeks' work. It'd cost a million dollars, you know what I mean? 'Cause they've gotta fill in, between the fingers. So, I've gotta do it like that (with fingers together).

"It's terrible when there's 30 people, all working special effects, going: `$#@!, Bob, you're doing it again!' `Oh, &%$! -- sorry, guys!' "