Bob Hoskins, who shared the Best Actor Award at Cannes this year for his performance as a small-time crook in Neil Jordan's romantic thriller ''Mona Lisa,'' which has its New York premiere Friday at Cinema 1, derides the idea that he is now a star. Sitting in the lounge of a smart London hotel and filling the air with broad Cockney vowels, he hoots with laughter at the notion of himself as a hot international property. ''I don't think I'm the sort of material movie stars are made of,'' he says. ''You've got to be a bit glamorous for that. I'm 5 foot 6 inches and cubic. My own mum wouldn't call me pretty.'' But surely a star is simply someone who gets his name above the title? ''Yes,'' retorts Mr. Hoskins. ''But so did Bela Lugosi.'' That is typical Hoskins, whose conversation is a mixture of Cockney banter and homespun philosophy. What you meet off the screen is very much what you see on it: a chunky figure with a powerful, close-cropped head that looks as though it could batter bricks and a gregariously cheerful nature. But, star or not, Mr. Hoskins became a name to American film audiences through his performances as a brutish gangland boss in a British thriller, ''The Long Good Friday,'' as the New York mobster Owney Madden in Francis Ford Coppola's ''Cotton Club'' and as a Hollywood screenwriter in the current ''Sweet Liberty.'' Despite the ripe East End accent, he was born 43 years ago in a small town in Suffolk but was brought up in north London, where his mother was a school cook, his father a clerical worker. The latter once warned his son: ''You'll either wind up a millionaire - or on the gallows.'' Fortunately the first prediction looks more likely. Mr. Hoskins quit school at 15 and for the next 10 years tried his hand at almost everything. ''I dug the roads,'' he says, ''drove a truck, became a window cleaner, a porter in Covent Garden market, a trainee commercial artist and studied for three years to be an accountant: it was only when I got the certificates I realized it wasn't what I wanted to do. I got into acting by accident. I was in a bar, and they were auditioning for an amateur play upstairs and must have thought I was one of the guys for the audition. They said, 'You're next,' so I read the part and got the lead in this play. An agent saw me and told me I should turn professional and I said, 'Get me a job and I will.' I was a very bad actor to start with. There was a lot of energy but no actual craft.'' Mr. Hoskins tells some hilarious actors' stories about his three-year trudge round the British regional theaters from 1969 to 1972. One afternoon he was playing Richard III, began ''Now is the winter of our discontent,'' realized there were only three people sitting out front and leapt straight into ''My kingdom for a horse,'' telling the audience he'd buy them all a drink in the pub in five minutes. But the turning point for Mr. Hoskins came at London's Royal Court Theater in 1972 with, significantly, a play about the making of a movie. Charles Wood's ''Veterans'' was a lightly fictionalized account of the filming of Tony Richardson's ''Charge of the Light Brigade''; and in one scene the unit electrician, Bernie the Volt (Mr. Hoskins), chatted to the bemused star (John Gielgud), stuck on a prop horse surrounded by eddying smoke. Mr. Hoskins stole the scene and, what is more, the attention of the producer Kenith Trodd, who gave him the starring role of a sheet-music salesman in Dennis Potter's television series, ''Pennies From Heaven.'' Since then Mr. Hoskins has never stopped. At Britain's National Theater, he was a failed crook in Sam Shepard's ''True West'' and Nathan Detroit in ''Guys and Dolls.'' He played Iago in the BBC TV Shakespeare's ''Othello'' and Mussolini in an ill-fated Italian film for HBO. And his film career has taken him from a small role in John Byron's ''Inserts,'' with Richard Dreyfuss, to fame in ''Mona Lisa.'' Given his own natural bonhomie, why is he so often cast as mobsters or monsters? ''But,'' protests Mr. Hoskins, ''I've done other things as well. I played a police chief in 'The Honorary Consul,' and in Alan Alda's 'Sweet Liberty' I'm a neurotic American screenwriter. If people remember the heavies, it's because what I try and do is make the audience understand them. If you just show a bad man, that's rubbish, that's cartoon time. Eichmann used to take flowers home to his wife and was a good father; and, if you were playing him, you'd have to show that as well as the perpetrator of Nazi atrocities. ''That's the great thing about film as opposed to the stage: you can show someone thinking. You can take an audience into your mind and your bloodstream so they are not just observing you, they're feeling with you. Mind you, it doesn't always work. I was heartbroken when I saw the Mussolini film. It was flat as a pancake because the Italians dub sound very badly, so there was this great bald thing on the screen and a voice that seemed to come from somewhere else. I realized what they were doing and should have compensated by acting with the facial muscles more than the voice.'' There is a strong streak of sentimentality in Mr. Hoskins that enables him to humanize monsters in a way few have since Cagney: alongside that exists an instinctive feminism. Surprisingly, in view of his burly maleness, he claims has learned most about acting from the star actresses (Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren, Diana Rigg) he has played alongside. ''For nearly 2,000 years,'' suggests Mr. Hoskins, ''women have had to play a secondary role to men, but women can express a private moment or hidden thought without saying a word. Acting is all about the revelations of those private, unshielded moments. If you want to find out how to express something, you watch the women, and that is what I have done all through my career. In acting you've got to use the feminine side of you. I don't mean the limp wrist but what are still considered the feminine qualities: vulnerability, affection, tenderness. I think a really dignified person is someone who allows all that to show and is not afraid to be themselves.'' This may be the clue to Mr. Hoskins's success in ''Mona Lisa,'' where he plays George, an ex-convict who gets a job chauffeuring a black prostitute round London hotels and finds himself falling in love with her and drawn into a search for her missing girlfriend, a drug addict. When Neil Jordan (the Irish director who made ''Angel'' and ''Company of Wolves'') first sent him the script, Mr. Hoskins turned it down. Mr. Jordan's revised, second version had him barking with delight. ''In the first version,'' says Mr. Hoskins, ''I was running round like Rambo. But I said to Neil, 'Rambo I ain't.' The guy was one of those superheroes, whereas the really brave people are vulnerable. I saw it right from the beginning as less of a thriller than a love story, and one of the reasons I adore it so much is that it goes against the current trend. ''In a lot of pictures today the core of the piece is hatred and revenge. In this, terrible things happen, but they happen because of the deep feelings locked inside someone. The only research I did was to take my daughter to the London Zoo and look at all those beautiful creatures in the bird cages. To me that explained George, who's got a big soul trapped inside him. First of all he's been in prison. But he's also trapped inside his own ignorance. You could never tell a drama student to go and look at the monkeys in the zoo. But, as an actor, you have to get an instinct for creating the right feeling.'' Mr. Hoskins has the native shrewdness of the self-taught. In Alan Alda's ''Sweet Liberty,'' he proved he could work the Methodical American way: he and Mr. Alda spent many happy hours building up the neurotic writer's family history and his dominance by an overachieving brother. Next spring Mr. Hoskins will also branch out as writer/director, with the shooting in Czechoslovakia of his own script, ''The Raggedy Rawney,'' which is about wartime gypsies and a legend passed on to him by his grandmother. In the prefabricated world of movie stars, Mr. Hoskins is undeniably an original. He also proves the truth of the writer David Hare's dictum that ''acting is a judgment of character,'' since Mr. Hoskins's ability to invest all kind of hoodlums with some vital spark of humanity springs from the man himself. Copyright 1986 The New York Times Company |
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