A friend of mine once interviewed Bob Hoskins. He's very nice, she said, a good bloke, and funny, but you've got to beware. He tells his life as a series of anecdotes and he tells everyone the same anecdotes. And she is right. This is exactly what he does. No deviation, no hesitation. Just repetition.

There's the one about Francis Ford Coppola ringing him circa 1982 to offer him the part of gangster Owney Madden in The Cotton Club. "It was the middle of the night, I'd just got the baby off to sleep, the phone goes and there's this voice saying, 'This is Francis Ford Coppola.' I said, 'And I'm fuckin' Henry the Eighth and you've just woken my kid up,' and put the phone down."

Or the one about Brian de Palma calling him over to LA to talk about playing the role of Al Capone in The Untouchables. "He said to me, 'Really, I want De Niro for the part, but if he can't do it, can I come to you, Bob, at the last minute?' I said, 'Sure if I'm available.' Then I heard De Niro got the part, and didn't think another thing about it. Some months later, Linda [his wife] was opening the post and there's this cheque for $200,000 and a note from Brian saying, 'Thank you for your time.' I rang him straight away. I said, 'Brian, you got any other films you don't want me to be in, I'm here for you, mate, any time.'"

And just one more. There's something irresistible about these stories. It's not simply the way he tells them, for all his life as though he's never told them before - no, not like an actor repeating the same lines every night - something more complex is going on here. Anyway. It's the Oscar ceremony, 1987, and he has been nominated for Best Actor for his role as the unlikely love interest in Neil Jordan'sMona Lisa. He's got out of the limo and he's standing in line. "There's this fella calling out all the celebrities as they go in, and me and Linda get to the front of the queue. And he announces the person behind us..."

He could go on like this forever. His schooldays, the sadistic teachers tying his left hand to a chair to force him to write right-handed. As a porter at Covent Garden in the late 50s, seeing the ghost of a nun - "it used to be Convent Garden" - which, according to local superstition, meant he'd lead a charmed life. A banana-picker on a kibbutz in the early 60s. He left when they wanted him to join the army. Thought, "fuck that." How he got into "the business" one day waiting for his friend, the actor Roger Frost, to finish an audition. Hoskins was propping up the Unity theatre bar when someone thrust a script into his hand saying, "You're next." He got the part. And in this succession of anecdotes not one inconsistency. In more than 20 years, since he first became known as an actor, he has never felt any need to complicate or to polish his persona. All the stories are "genuine", he says. And this is the point. Genuineness. It is what he's asserting over and over - a particular kind of authenticity - the common man, the man on the street.

Because what is anecdote? It's what's cosy, familiar. It is what we had before we had fact, or theory. It is everything reduced to the particular. It's me and you, neighbourliness, community. By approaching everything through anecdote Hoskins is affirming those good old-fashioned values - the ones he was brought up with in London's East End. The ones he trusts. By continually insisting on his roots he forms a bridge between the working-class culture he came from and the essentially middle-class world he moved into.

Because what do we hear when he tells Coppola to fuck off? We hear that he's not impressed, that he's got more important things to think about, like getting his daughter to sleep. That daily life is not subordinate to stardom. So the short, stubby "cube" is overlooked in the queue. Do you think he cares? Do you think he'd be so stupid as to take Hollywood that seriously? This may not sound like much at the end of the 90s, when so-called estuarine English has so permeated mainstream culture that the prime minister slips into it to avow his street cred on TV. But think back to the 50s, when Hoskins was coming of age. It was the first time that mainstream culture was challenged - when the working class finally began to assert its cultural right. And it started in the theatre, with kitchen-sink drama, social realism, Osborne's Look Back In Anger and then fed into the left-wing liberal film industry of the 60s - Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson et al . It was, I suppose, the British equivalent of Marlon Brando and James Dean, and, like them, was supposed to release us all from the chains of the cultural divide. Like hell.

I remember Hoskins in the early 80s, when he was working at the National Theatre and working the most punishing schedule - rehearsing Guys And Dolls by day and playing Sam Shepherd's True West by night - and he was like fresh air blowing through. This was the time when the National was run by the son of railway station master who then took a knighthood. It was full of people who'd come out of RADA, all sounding exactly the same and not like anybody else. This milieu was closed, elitist, competitive, jealous - everything, in other words, that Hoskins stands against. And he was at the top of it. He always says that he left the theatre because of the money. That's another one of his favourites.

John Gielgud saying to him when they were both at the Royal Court, "Don't make the same mistake I did my boy. Don't stay in the theatre. No money in it." He got out as soon as he could and he hasn't gone back. You seize your opportunities he says. "No one turns down Coppola." Of course not. But, when he got to New York for the filming, what struck him was the sense of community, of a shared endeavour. He was made to do his first speech, "four fuckin' pages of it", in front of all the crew and the actors. "When I finished, everyone applauded. I couldn't believe it. I can't think I was particularly impressive." But then, that's the thing about America, he says. "If you can do it, you're okay." Or, to put it another way - they accept you for what you are - rather than judging you by a set of values imposed from the outside.

In England, he is always the cockney, caricatured ad nauseam for his glottal stops, his spring-heeled enthusiasm, his home-spun philosophies. He says it himself. "There are four types of reaction. They lock up the silver. They talk to you slowly like you're an idiot. They think Hamlet in a cockney accent is the funniest thing in the world. Or they tell you most of their friends are working class and some are even black." But in America they love him. And so, according to Atom Egoyan who has just directed Hoskins in an adaptation of William Trevor's Felicia's Journey, does the rest of the world. "I was shocked when I came to England how Hoskins is taken for granted. People were coming up to me asking why I had wanted him for the role of Hilditch. It became obvious that you don't see him as we see him." What he admires, Egoyan says, is a particular kind of openness. "With Bob, what you see is what you get. There's no separation, nothing luvvie, nothing precious at all."

Exactly. Hoskins stands in for the common man and this is his cultural force. And in envy-ridden, prestige-ridden England, we don't like it. Even his British Telecom ads - which he did, as he says, "for 500,000 reasons, all of them with the Queen's head on" - were resented as if he had in some way sold out, sold his talent down the river. As though money is a dirty word.

Hoskins is a constant reminder. As if he is in permanent conversation with a culture of the past. I'm not trying to suggest that he's a dinosaur. On the contrary - the culture is now trying to catch up with what he's always represented - but it must have been a strain all those years insisting on this part. Talking to him, mostly he shrugs it off. Laughs. "Life's a laugh" could almost be his motto.

But just occasionally you get close to it. We were talking about homosexuality. Out pops another anecdote. "I remember I was at a dinner party with some heavy intellectual people. I realise now they were trying to get a rise out of me. One of them said, 'What would you do, Bob, if you woke up in the morning and discovered you were gay?' I said, 'I'd get meself a fella. What would you expect me to do?' " What's interesting about this is not just the caricaturing, or Hoskins's reply. The key is in the intellectuals. He must have had to stomach these kind of patronising wise-arses often. And that's quite a tension to maintain. I asked him if he gets pissed off about class. "Nah," he said. "I just find it rather silly."

Silly is a good word. There's no anger in it. What he's saying is, he never took it seriously - though he knows perfectly well that it is serious. That "silly" was his protection. "I used to think I might be mad. That anyone who has the lack of seriousness I have, who sees the world as a bit silly, who can see the funny side... I thought I'd end up being put away." That's what he learned as a kid. The culture was too strong - if you fight, you lose. They just tie one hand to a chair and leave you with your weaker hand.

Elsie, his mother, was a nursery-school teacher, Bob, his father, a clerk. Our Bob was their only child. "I think they had enough with me. I put them off." But that's just him being silly. In fact, Elsie had a miscarriage, which he remembers, and after that he invented a little sister called Sophie because he hated being the only one. He is still frightened of loneliness. "It's not that I mind being on my own; I used to spend days on my own. It's not having people around when you need them." Elsie was the sort of mum who thought that the best reason for changing underpants was in case you got run over. And his dad just acquiesced in everything. "It was a funny relationship with my dad. He used to treat me like I was his dad, like I was the head of the family."

Elsie adored her son. "She made me feel like I was as good as anyone else." Not an easy task, he says. "Lots of kids suffer from terrible inferiority complexes, there's all sorts of stuff you have to deal with if you come from the working class. People have an awful time." In just about every interview he has ever given, Hoskins has repeated his mother's mantra: "If people don't like you, fuck 'em, they've got not taste." And, as is only proper, when someone has looked after you like that - protected you, reinforced your identity - you don't walk away from them. You stick with what you know and what you know you can trust.

When Elsie was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, her last wish was to go to Australia to see her best friend. Hoskins was against it, he wanted her to reserve her strength, but he paid for the trip. "Of course." In 1995, he admitted her to a Harley Street clinic. He told his dad it was close to the end, that he'd have to let her go, and then he rang the hospital. " 'You've got heroin, haven't you? Well, I want my mum to go out in the best party going.' And she went like a lady, had a ball. Thank God I've got money." After her death, he moved house and put his dad in the basement flat. "I didn't want him living with us, if you know what I mean, but I didn't want him living on his own. So he's got his own front door, his own way of life." Loyalty, human values, no need to dress them up in fancy terms. That's what they taught him.

It's all there, not just in his background but in the way he talks about his background. Born during the war, 1942. Growing up in post-war London, Finsbury Park, "on the street", no money, "in the same boat as everybody else". He left school at 15, was in a blues group, became a plumber, a steeplejack, a porter at Covent Garden. He started travelling. Israel, didn't want to fight someone else's war. Back to England. Where there was a slightly mysterious spell as a circus fire-eater. In 1967 he married his first wife, Jane, and had two children, Alex and Sarah. Then, 1968, into the theatre. It took 10 years before he got his first big success in Denis Potter's Pennies From Heaven in 1978. And in precisely that year, everything began to fall apart. His marriage went and then his mind. He cracked like a plate.

He has always attributed his breakdown to the strain of the failure of his marriage, "walking away from the kids". And this does seem very likely. But it slightly begs the question of what made the marriage fail. He was abroad a lot working. There was the "mud hut" incident in South Africa when a young woman moved in with him during the filming of Zulu Dawn. "She was just a family friend." So it was platonic? "Er, no." He was confused and the marriage was adrift, he says. "We were two people who shouldn't have been together." Maybe here finally was something he couldn't shrug off as just silly. The anger he'd held so long at bay got to him. And it was, as he'd known all along, self-destructive. (In 1980, his ex-wife sold the story, Bob's a violent man, to the Sun.) He started living in a van, he was completely broke. That's enough to make anyone crack.

Hoskins tells a story of when he first went into the theatre and they tried to give him elocution and deportment lessons. He thought, hang on, "I'm gonna talk like I don't, walk like I don't. Who the fuck then am I?" He cracked at his weakest point. Maybe, in the middle of the chaos of his marriage, he suddenly found himself, with his success, forced into a new environment, under pressure to maintain his identity and all of this was just too much. Or maybe the synchronicity of the success with the crack-up is coincidence, and it was the marriage after all.

Certainly it was his second marriage, to Linda, that put him back together. They met in 1980, married in 1982, and had two children, Rosa and Jack, in quick succession. The 80s became his decade. He did a number of big parts that showed his ability to play the tension between opposites - hard and soft, hero and villain, innocent and worldly. He was the charismatic gangster, full of a kind of compact brute force in The Long Good Friday (1981); bursting with Cagneyesque vaudevillian energy as Nathan Detroit in Guys And Dolls (1982); there was the Coppola film (1984); Alan Alda's Sweet Liberty (1985), in which he plays a neurotic screenwriter; and, in 1986, what seemed then his definitive role, as the taxi driver, George, in Mona Lisa, who falls in love with Cathy Tyson's tart.

Hoskins got writer/director Neil Jordan to rewrite the script for him before he'd accept the part - he wanted it less violent, with more raw emotion and a less ambivalent moral tone. He wrote and directed The Raggedy Rawney (1987), an anti-war saga about gypsies. And in 1988 made Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, his biggest commercial success to date. And he then stopped working, or working on anything of any significance, as if tired or bored with this decade of achievement, or as if the curve of success was taking him to somewhere he did not want to be. In 1995, he hit form again as J Edgar Hoover in Oliver Stone's Nixon, followed in 1997 by his marvellously modulated performance in Shane Meadows's low budget 24.7, as the little local hero who seeks to save the youth of the area by setting up a boxing club and then blows everything.

Since which he has hardly stopped working. He's got a speciality in monsters at the moment. He will be Noriega in a cable TV series. And in his new film, Felicia's Journey, he plays the lonely psychopath Hilditch, a man sexually neutered by his mother's domination of him, stuck in the past - he has never left the house he was born into - who kills friendless young girls so that he can keep them with him. What makes the performance is Hoskins's ability to get you to feel for this pathetic man who himself can feel nothing. As if Hilditch has somehow slipped out of feeling. Or as if feeling is just a persona that we slip into. It's his own worst nightmare, Hoskins says: "Not just to be without people, but to be annihilating people. That would be the end, that is as far as you can go."

He has said it everywhere and many times that Linda saved him. Together they put back the value system that had blasted apart in 1978. The family, the children, the loyalties. He is unswervingly faithful to her. He looks after all his kids, giving them money. "They're going to get it in the end, anyway." He looks after his old dad and Sammy his driver, his stand-in - a former taxi driver who has been with him for 20 years. If he slowed down in the 90s, he says, it's because he learned his lesson. He didn't want to risk his second marriage, he didn't need the money. "I don't have any use for a Tom Cruise-type salary." And: "When you're the best thing since sliced bread, it's wonderful. But when it starts to cool off, it is such a relief. Success is such a pain in the arse."

So, to the big question. Is it all genuine or it is it an act? Is so much consistency in one character credible. Well, I've looked and I can't find the gaps. So the answer is yes, he's the real thing. And if he is not, then he's a much better actor than he has ever been given credit for.