“I've ackshully learned my trade from watchin' women." What's this? Bob Hoskins the feral fireplug revealing a squishy side?

"I've never had an acting lesson in my life," he says expansively on the set of Heart Condition, the movie he's making with Denzel Washington and Chloe Webb. "I've learned by doing it, but mainly from watching women. I realized that drama was about private moments, private, personal things, and for thousands of years, women have had to keep their mouths shut, and they've developed this other language. You know exactly what a woman's thinking; she'll express it to you in her body language, in the flash of an eye. So I sorta used that, in the theater-especially on film."

It's an unabashedly appealing statement from the pride of Finsbury Park, the cockney with the rough edges unashamedly unsmoothed. So appealing you can't help wondering if it's not a pretested phrase - one proven to have worked before - particularly when the listener is a woman.

No matter. You don't stop this man even if you think he's repeating himself. The point is that watchfulness and intuitiveness make Hoskins interesting; they seem to be qualities far from his brickbat screen persona - what a fellow actor once described as "every middleclass woman's ideal of a bit of rough trade."

Bob Hoskins isn't rough trade. He can play it - actually, he's said he plays "the tender side of tough" - but it's not all he can do. He did, after all, play Eliza Doolittle's father, the philosophizing dustman, when he was only 32, to Diana Rigg's Eliza, as well as a hell-for-leather Iago to Anthony Hopkins's Othello.

Old jokes about Hoskins's physique, his patented "5-foot-6 and cubic," don't fit today. The new Hoskins is as hard as a medicine ball and as flat as a gentleman's wallet. Well, almost. In any case, it's becoming. It's also the result of bloody hard work, 30 minutes with a trainer, every night after shooting. Less well known is Hoskins the dramatist. As "Robert Williams," he has been writing plays for almost 20 years, slogging at it initially with skits and one-acts notable mostly for his good ear for dialogue, but pressing on to fully completed plays. Dog's Dinner was described by his biographer Karen Moline as “an extremely funny meditation on value of life.” The Bystander, which he also performed, was a ne-character play about a man's disintegration; it was based on the breakdown Hoskins had when his first marriage ended. (His subsequent marriage is widely regarded as stabilizing and successful. He has had two children with each wife.) Why Robert Williams? Hoskins says his first play poured out, when "I was in a quite drunken state. Next day, when a friend looked at it, saying, 'Who wrote this shit?' I said, 'Uh ... Robert Williams.' " Under that name, his plays have been produced in Paris, Cambridge, and at London's National Theater.

Variety has marked his theater work, but has the screen used Hoskins on one note, the mug with the heart of gold? Has it overlooked him as a romantic figure? The questions, obviously not new and not favorite, drive his voice softer and softer, into measured tones and faintly dangerous politeness.

“Sweet Liberty, A Prayer for the Dying, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, The Raggedy Rawney," he lists. "That's a New York Jewish writer, a priest, an ex-criminal, a very uptight Irish-American, and a Gypsy. I don't think you could call that typecasting. I wouldn't call the character in Sweet Liberty 'tough but lovable.' I wouldn't say Darkie in The Raggedy Rawney [the film, as yet unreleased in the U.S., Hoskins directed] was particularly lovable - in fact, he was a bastard. I don't think the things I've done have been unromantic. They're romantic to the extent that terrible things happen because someone loves somebody, like in Mona Lisa. And in Heart Condition, Mooney [his character] goes through everything for the girl."

As if on cue, Hoskins is called back to the movie's preposterous set, for a scene by the neoclassical swimming pool in the half-burned mansion once owned by Ferdinand Marcos's mistress, the actress Dovie Beams. A renovator's fire destroyed the second story a year ago. The lower half survived, however, and the grounds are perfectly rentable, so commerce goes on. Only those who are a little away from the action can see that it's a half-elegant corpse. It doesn't seem a bad metaphor for the movie business itself these days.

Hoskins has been made up to look stubbled and scruffy, as befits a man apparently dying when his body rejects a donor heart; the previous week, on location in a scrofulous Western Avenue pool hall and at a different part in the story, Hoskins was spiffed up for his role, dapper, a man ever so slightly on the make. Mooney's new heart has come from Napoleon Stone (Denzel Washington), a flashy lawyer whom Hoskins's racist L.A. detective, Jack Mooney, hasn't much admired in life. After Stone's death, Mooney discovers that both men have shared a further heart interest, callgirl Crystal Gerrity (Chloe Webb).

In that pool hall, Hoskins is jollity itself. Complimented on his svelteness, he rolls his eyes, saying, " 'Oo's the pretty fellow?" He lightens up a repetitious, draining business as though it were his job to do so, and people respond. "If they were voting a 'most popular' award around here," the still photographer volunteers, "Bob'd get it. Everyone loves him, everyone." It seems to be the Hoskins trademark. Ask Michelle Pfeiffer about working with him on Sweet Liberty and she remembers "his incredible sense of humor. He was always telling stories, little jokes, but they're just a part of him, and that part puts everyone at their ease. He's very endearing, real easy to be around.

"I guess that's the difference between genuinely gifted people and those who have to work at it. He's not one of those tormented actors who walk around creating havoc so he can feed on it to do his work. He makes his process look so easy. Bob likes to have a good time when he's working. I don't think he dwells on the dark side."

But today in smog-bound Pasadena, a series of reaction shots have unaccountably been misfiring in ways that are neither Washington's nor Hoskins's fault. It has made the day drag and Hoskins's spirits along with them. His natural cheerfulness seems curtailed. But finally, after a third trip back to the set, there's the sense that he's put his head down and decided to get through this flippin' interview, no matter what. Bumming a cigarette in the air-conditioned chill of his trailer, he becomes the talespinner. Directing had fallen into his life as accidentally as acting, to hear him tell it. While working in Australia on a TV film, The Dunera Boys, he had mentioned to its producer a legend about the Rawneys (Gypsies) that would make a good movie.

"Right - give me a script, we'll do it in Czechoslovakia," was the producer's instant response. So co-writing (with Nicole de Wilde), starring and directing, Hoskins squeezed The Raggedy Rawney, a fable about a band of Gypsies, into the year and a half that included the killing demands of Roger Rabbit (a "hallucinatory" experience, he says) and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Rawney showed Hoskins's empathy for directing actors and a painterly visual eye. Would he direct again? "Yes, but I'm going to have a lot more preparation."

Rawney carries a strong antiwar theme. What other themes are tugging at him? Hoskins's voice rises: "Terrorism-it's becoming a service industry to the authorities. The Secret Service can use a terrorist act - or fake a terrorist act - to manipulate world opinion very quickly. And that worries me a lot, because there's too many people ready to die, just for a political ideal or to keep someone in power."

The quality of life today also troubles him. "A lot of people call me stupid and foolish - okay maybe I am, maybe I'm a mug but I can't go against my feelings. If we don't start looking after the children's education, and if the health services crack up, we're going to end up in a world of sickly ignoramuses, and what sort of world are we gonna live in then?

"And in the acting business where everybody talks about apartheid, you have to think that there've been hundreds of white actors who've blacked up to play Othello, but there's never been one black actor who's played Hamlet. It's very difficult to cast a black actor if it's not specifically said in the script that the character is black. 'But what are you trying to say?' they ask." Hoskins's fury mounts as he acts out this exchange. " 'Ang on,' I say, 'you are practicing exactly what you're saying we're against!'

"And that's one of the major issues of today, this black-white shit. It's crazy, absolutely crazy!" Fatefully, the knock on Hoskins's door this time is from Denzel Washington, embarrassed that he's interrupting, wanting to borrow a script. Hoskins gestures to the door after Washington leaves. "Typical example - he'd make a brilliant Hamlet, a wonderful Hamlet."

It's hard to tell anything about Heart Condition, the first feature by its young-looking writer/director James Parriott. On the matter of the film's interracial comedy, it should be noted that its highly successful producer, Steve Tisch, also made Soul Man, a movie not easily forgotten in some quarters for the way it depicted a white law student in blackface.

Hoskins sees his own challenge on Heart Condition clearly: "Although it's a comedy, it's a very strong love story - love is the whole force behind this. One guy's already dead, but his heart's still beating, and 'e loves her. And there's this other guy who's a pig of a man, but ‘e loves her. That amount of love for a woman . . . " The sentence hangs there. "Touch wood, I 'ope I'm gonna pull it off. If that doesn't come off when you see the film - I've failed."

Hoskins fail? It sounds implausible. Then you realize, it's never happened. Hoskins has been in a few films that haven't worked, had a whack at a few stage characterizations that were impossibly conceived. Yet he's never done a bad job. It hardly seems that he'd start now.