His name is Bob Hoskins, and it's the name to know.

Discerning moviegoers already know him from The Long Good Friday as the gangster Harold Shand whose empire inexplicibly is crumbling around him. In Dennis Potter's highly praised TV series, Pennies From Heaven, he played the miserable songsheet salesman Arthur Parker. And in company with Fred Gwynne, he stole every scene in Francis Coppola's The Cotton Club in which he appeared.

Earlier this year, he was seen briefly in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and at the moment, he is on view in Alan Alda's comedy, Sweet Liberty (at the York and Market Square), playing a screenwriter who cheerfully mangles the history of the American Revolution in the name of Hollywood.

Later this summer, probably in early July, Hoskins will be seen in Toronto in his best screen performance to date. As the tough but somehow lovable hood in Mona Lisa, Neil Jordan's gritty thriller, Hoskins won the best actor award at the recent Cannes Film Festival. He also made a lot of friends. Everyone who encountered him at the festival was charmed by his openness and his zest, the sheer enjoyment he gets from being a marvelous actor.

Despite the tough guy roles for which he is best known, there is about him, a shy, almost childlike vulnerability. He is a gentle man, who considers himself "quite musical," and in fact had a hit on stage with a revival of (what else?) Guys And Dolls. He does not, however, consider himself to be a star. He is, after all, shaped like a howitzer shell, and if he wasn't so damned cheerful, that large head of his could well sit there, flat and brooding, and full of dark menace.

But Spencer Tracy was not handsome in any traditional Hollywood sense, and neither, for that matter, was Jimmy Cagney or Humphrey Bogart. If the movies are in the mood for a pug with a cockney accent possessed of large talent and an ego the size of a pea, Hoskins is available. Except there are riders. He doesn't want to just make movies. He wants to make good movies. He resists the siren call of moving to Hollywood because he is afraid people will think his price is too high, and it would cut him off from a lot of work.

In the last four years, he said, he has made films in Australia, Italy and Ireland. His fee for doing the Irish film was a television set. One cannot quite believe this. A what? "A television set," Hoskins said offhandedly. "You know, a telly. That was my fee. A television set." When asked at the Cannes Film Festival recently about whether Pennies From Heaven or The Long Good Friday represented the greater turning point in his career, he paused a long time before answering.

"You know, I don't know," he said quietly. "See, I don't know about turning points. It's been a sort of slow rise, really. No real turning point. All the work I did after Pennies From Heaven was work I had accepted before I did the series. After Long Good Friday, the same thing. Obviously, it made a difference, but I can't say I've ever sat down and thought, 'I've cracked it. I'm a star.' It seems to me, ever since I made The Long Good Friday, I been goin' down hill as far as being a star is concerned. When I did that, they said, 'you're a star.' The next film I did, they said, 'This is gonna make you a star.' The film after that they said, 'This is gonna put you right on the road to bein' a star.' "

But there is no excuse in Mona Lisa. Hoskins doesn't just carry the movie, he is the movie, despite a bravura performance from Cathy Tyson as the beautiful prostitute with whom he gets entangled, and a cameo turn from Michael Caine as one of the nastiest mobsters ever consigned to celluloid. As George, a smalltime hood recently sprung from prison and beginning to realize he is not a bad guy after all, Hoskins gives a performance that is at once full of bluster and carefully detailed nuance.

"It wasn't an easy thing to do, actually, to bring about a man who is strong, vulnerable, serious funny, sympathetic, hateful, ridiculous, dignified. You know, all these paradoxes. You couldn't present him in just one aspect. I think it's the best thing I've ever done. I'm very proud of it."

Mona Lisa was filmed mostly at night in the seedier sections of London by director Jordan who resolutely shied away from any location that smacked of the ones London tourists know. Sweet Liberty, on the other hand, represented considerably less of a challenge, and a much more comfortable location on Long Island. "We had a ball," Hoskins said enthusiastically. "Even Michael. Michael Caine said, 'I've done 53 pictures, and I've never been treated as well as this.' It was wonderful. We all got given a house, with a swimming pool, in the Hamptons."

In both Mona Lisa and Sweet Liberty, Hoskins worked with his good friend, Michael Caine (the two also appeared together in Beyond The Limit). However, Hoskins has no desire to emulate Caine's kind of movie stardom. "Michael has put together a lifestyle for himself which he loves," Hoskins said. "He loves being in the game, he loves being in films, and he lives a wonderful life. He enjoys every single minute of it, and I admire him for that. You offer him the money, give him the part, and a good location, and he's there.

"Michael has done some terrible films, but he's never given a bad performance. But I think to have that kind of stardom, you've got to have a kind of glamour. Michael is very glamorous. Even my mom wouldn't call me pretty. But I couldn't actually live Michael's lifestyle. I'm happier being at home watching the telly with the kids. I get bored at cocktail parties."

Despite the raspy cockney sound of his voice, Hoskins actually was born in Bury St. Edmunds, about 70 miles outside London. He was brought up in Finsbury Park in North London. He quit school at the age of 15, and worked at all sorts of jobs - among them, a Covent Garden porter, road digger, truck driver and accountant - before literally stumbling into acting at the age of 26. He happened to accompany a friend to a theatre in North London and was sitting in the bar when the stage manager, mistaking him for one of the actors, approached and announced: "We're ready for you now." He read for the lead in the amateur play and won the part. "When I first got on stage," he has said, "I realized how great it was. And the longer I've done it, the more I like it. I like the people, the atmosphere, absolutely everything."

From 1969 until 1972 he played in regional theatres. Then he got a small part in London's Royal Court Theatre production of Charles Wood's Veterans, a fictionalized account of the making of the film, The Charge Of the Light Brigade. Hoskins played an electrician on the movie set, and managed to steal the scene right out from under the fine, patrician nose of Sir John Gielgud. The theft attracted the attention of producer Kenith Rodd, who gave him the part of the songsheet salesman in Pennies From Heaven.

These days Hoskins lives in the Islington area of North London, near where he was brought up. He is married, for the second time, to an attractive blonde named Linda. "All and all I got four kids," he said. "I got two by my first marriage, 17 and 13, and Rosa, 3, and Jack, 1, by this marriage. I'm startin' again, you know?"

He plans to direct his next picture from his own script. It's titled The Raggedy Rawney. "It's about gypsies in wartime, and it's based on an old gypsy legend." So for the moment, even the contemplation of big-time American stardom is on the back burner. "If someone said come to California, we'll pay you a million dollars, I'd be there like a flash," he said. "If," he carefully added, "it was a good picture. I'm not going to sit around in Beverly Hills waitin' for someone to think up a good movie." In the world of movies, that is what passes for good news.

Copyright 1986 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.  
The Toronto Star