THE INTENTION was not to be an actor, much less a classical English actor, much less the only classical English actor ever to turn into the only American movie star who ever co-starred with a ghost, Cher and a rabbit.

But here's Bob Hoskins , 47, unrepentently street Cockney, balding, with an shape he likes to describe as "five-foot-six cubic." Asked why he has been embraced so tenderly by Hollywood sharpies with dollar signs in their eyes, he chuckles and says, "I really dunno." Clearly, however, he is having a swell time finding out.

Starting tomorrow, Hoskins will be seen with Denzel Washington in "Heart Condition," a buddy comedy about a bigoted L.A. cop who gets a heart transplant from a black yuppie lawyer and must endure life with his ghost. This is the first film since he made his mass-market breakthrough in 1988 and saved Toon Town in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." Just before that, he made his writing and directing debut in "The Raggedy Rawny," an antiwar film opening here this spring, and, just now, he has finished his grueling assignment as Cher's love interest in "Mermaids."

"Cher cast me!" he says, wallowing in triumph and incredulity. "She cast me! She said she wanted a guy who looked like he went to baseball matches and et' 'amburgers. She's so wonderful! Ha! She wanted to work with me."

About now, observers may be surprised to learn several things about Hoskins, who impressed American audiences as the "new Cagney" in the 1984 "Cotton Club" and got a 1986 Oscar nomination as the chauffeur to a high-priced prostitute in the elegantly noir "Mona Lisa."

First off, he really does talk in self-delighted exclamation points and, despite the uncanny variety of American accents heard in his Hollywood films, he talks in heavy working-class Cockney. Cher comes out "Sure." And he swears like, well, like a sailor, which he was once, for two weeks, in the Norwegian Navy because, he has claimed, "I wanted to be a Viking, but it didn't work out."

Imagine the body of Danny DeVito and the spirit of Michael Caine. Hoskins comes off as a raucous but sensitive soul, devoted to his two young children, his two teenagers from his first marriage and his second wife, a high-school sociology teacher named Linda, whom he met in a pub on the Royal Wedding Day. They live in the old London neighborhood where he grew up, near his wife's parents and his own parents, whom he sees every day he is home.

Although he wouldn't mind moving closer to the action here, he refuses to take the kids away from their grandparents "and they're too old to uproot them and bring them over here." When pressed to talk about his parents' feelings about his career, he admits, "They're really proud. A little over proud . . . They can be downright embarrassin' sometimes, but, yeah, it's good . . . When I was a kid, everybody said I was gonna wind up on the gallows, this kid, this lunatic. But not my Mum. She was really happy when I settled down to a steady job in the theater."

The concepts of "steady job" and "theater" are seldom heard in the same sentence, especially by mothers. But Hoskins dropped out of school at 15, hung around the pubs and took odd jobs - a porter, a steeplejack, a mango picker, would-be Viking, even a circus fire-eater - before he wandered, after a couple of pints, into a community theater audition in 1968. "I don't know if I realized I could do it," he remembers, "but I realized right away that this is what I wanted to do. The stage was the most peaceful and creative place in the world.

"I'd always written poetry and painted and did things like that. But I like being with people. I get lonely very quickly and, to be in an arena where what you are in a collective art form, with all these other people to play with and you're all part of something. That, for me, is paradise."

For American filmgoers, Hoskins is fresh meat, a mysterious chameleon who seemed to emerge, fully formed, as the complicated tough guys in "The Long Good Friday," "Cotton Club" and "Mona Lisa," or as the neurotic Brooklyn screenwriter in "Sweet Liberty," or as People magazine's "Most Astonishing New Star" among the "25 Most Intriguing People of 1986."

But it's hard to blame Hoskins for getting a bit weary of Americans who talk to him as if he were the lucky bloke who just won the Silverscreen Lottery. In the years between his first audition and his Americanization, he moved quickly into the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theater and the Royal Court. He played Iago in Jonathan Miller's "Othello," Nathan Detroit in "Guys and Dolls." He did "Duchess of Malfi," "Richard III" and "True West."

"And the business seemed to accept me right away," he says. "I hadn't seen much theater as a kid, but I'd seen old-time music hall, the comedians, you know. And American movies" - where he thinks he picked up his way with accents. "I've always been a survivor, but the theater was the first place I'd ever been where I was universally accepted. By John Gielgud. Celia Johnson. These incredible sort of people totally accepted me."

Completely self-educated, he read one Shakespeare play after another. "I couldn't stop. It was like fireworks, imagining what a performance would be. But I've never seen a performance of Shakespeare that lived up to the possibilities I saw in my head . . . if you know what I mean?"

He also developed his own eccentric but thoroughly lovable acting method: he studies women. Don't laugh. "Drama is about private moments that you don't see in life except in a dramatic moment," he insists, "when you see someone acting in an unguarded way. Everyone says women talk too much, but, really, they've had to keep their mouths shut for thousands of years. Men hide behind so many barriers that they aren't equipped to communicate, but walk into a room and a woman's unspoken language will tell you exactly how she feels. It has nothing to do with femininity. It has to do with actual communication about private moments."

He worked in theater on and off until about six years ago, but he knows the "theater has been in a bit of a slump lately. There's some good stuff, David Mamet, but isolated things. When I was coming up, it was extraordinary. Lots of experimental stuff. We'd walk into a pub and do a show, uninvited, so I had to learn to sell myself quickly or get a pint thrown at me. I was living on the hat, feeding wife and kids." He'd "love" to work in the theater again, "love" to try New York. But not while he has "these babies. When I had my first kids, I was in the theater. My life started in the night and, when I came home, everybody had gone to bed. The kids woke up and wanted to play. I was asleep. So the second time around, I'm taking my time with my kids very seriously."

As for the kids, well, "They get bored with me. `Go play with Dad for a while, he's sittin' in the corner sulking.' Am I permissive? Certainly not! One word from me - and they all do what they want."

His best kid story involves "Roger Rabbit," the movie he believed would make him a hero in the schoolyard forever. "But Jack, who was three at the time, wouldn't talk to me. He was really upset. It took me about two weeks to figure out that he's thinking, `There's my dad. He's got friends like Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck - and he don't bring 'em home. He brings his boring friends home, but he can't bring these home?' " Hoskins' own feelings about "Roger Rabbit" are mixed. Although the film made him well-known to a broad audience, he claims he cannot gauge its effect on his career and the offers he is getting. The movie, a huge box-office success in 1988 and last year as a Christmas video, was a technological wonder that put a human, Hoskins, onscreen with animated characters. "I don't know what it was like for the audience, but the interest for me was the challenge. Say we had 30 other people, all animators, a real team, and we had to get it exactly right.

"The concentration was complete. I remember one breakfast, a sausage roll with one of the staff. He suddenly looked at me and said, `What's the time?' I said, `It's breakfast time.' He said, `Did I go home last night?' and he had to phone his wife to see if he'd been home. I thought, `Hey, I can't remember either.' So I asked Linda, `What am I like when I come home?' and she said, `You're a zombie. You come home, eat your food, get up and that's it.' "

He knows it was "incredibly interesting," but, when reminded that a sequel is in the works, he moans and makes a face. "It will be easier the second time . . . I guess."

It seems he had to sign for the sequel when he made the original deal. "They wanted me to sign for six!" he says laughing. "Are you kidding? I'm gonna be acting with rabbits when I'm 96? But I couldn't say I was big box office, that I was the kind of actor who was going to make money for them. Okay, you might go to see a film because I'm in it, but you wouldn't go to see `Roger Rabbit' for that reason, would you?"

The other problem, umm, has to do with paychecks. According to Hoskins, he was contracted to get a percentage of the net profits - called points and "there's no point to points." As the industry is learning from Art Buchwald's recent suit against Eddie Murphy's "Coming to America," studios are finding ways to juggle the books and deny that hit movies ever made a profit. " `Roger Rabbit' really taught me what it means, `creative accountancy,' " Hoskins says laughing. "It looks great on paper, but points have become a joke.

"Naaah, I don't really feel ripped off. I knew the points would be silly. But that's an accountant's job. That's what he does. A producer has to make his company money and the only way to make the company money is to take it away from somebody else. That's why actors go for so much money up front. Because they're not going to get it in the points."

Will the Buchwald revelations clean things up? "Nah, they'll just redefine the terms in a contract. People used to get paid for points, but now accountants have found a way of getting around these points. All that will happen is that the agents will work out a new contract with other points. That will work for a couple of years and the accountants will find another way around it."

So "Roger Rabbit" didn't make any money? "Ha!" He shrugs philosophically. "I've got points in `Mona Lisa' and, apparently, that's still in debt, too!"

In fact, "Roger Rabbit" was so exhausting - "mentally, as well as physically" - that he took a year off. "My doctor said, `Do you want a bad back or what do you want? Just take time off and rest.' "

Asked about a rumored physical-fitness routine, he takes a sip of his whiskey sour and looks skeptical. "You've got to do something to keep fit, y'know. If someone says, `At six in the morning, we're gonna shoot the nervous breakdown, maybe 12 or 14 times, or maybe have a heart attack, quite a few times, after lunch.' I'm no fitness fanatic, but I guess it's part of the business."

He does have to have that heart attack in "Heart Condition," a movie whose medicine puzzled him less than its attitudes about race. "Racism isn't foreign to Britain, but it's very different," he says. "England is no more enlightened, but we have a class structure based on breeding.

"To us, the image of the black man is the West Indian - Bob Marley. I didn't understand a lot of the prejudice stuff in the script. Like, I always thought a spook was a ghost. Denzel would say, `Geez, you don't even know what you're saying, do you?' I didn't know what I was talkin' about. But I don't think the movie is about race at all. It's about two half-men who become one whole man."

In this one, Hoskins gets the girl. But, as he likes to remind Americans, it's hardly the first time. In 1981, he was the prize catch in the BBC series "Flickers." And in 1982 he starred in the BBC version of "Pennies From Heaven."

"I'll never forget that," he says with a grin. "The choreographer convinced me I was Fred Astaire. I felt so graceful, wonderful, really I felt like the romantic lead. Then I saw it and . . . There's this little hippopotamus. I looked really silly."

And, yet, he thinks he knows why he gets cast as the romantic hero. "Plenty of people look as if they should make a perfect partner, but they don't. You know what I mean? They look like they can't love anyone but themselves. I suppose the greatest lovers on screen have always been the guys who actually looked as if they very passionately loved someone. You need to be able to show you can love."

In "Mona Lisa," he was "the tough guy who was totally vulnerable. To see the big man cry is very . . . moving." In "Mermaids," he is an "unbelievably straight guy who can't believe anything like Cher could happen to him." In "Plastic Nightmare," co-starring Tom Berenger and Greta Scacchi, he will play a detective who works in a pet shop. "I've got a lot of days off in that one," he says with a laugh. "This `leading man' thing is an American hangup. You're the first one there in the morning, the last one at night. Forget it! I like the ones when you do your bit for two or three weeks and get the same pay. It's the mug who needs to say `I'm the leading man . . .' "

Hoskins, of course, knows about being the mug who works too hard. He relished writing, directing and starring in "Raggedy Rawny" enough to sign up to direct two more. This one is a gypsy story, "a story I've known my whole life. I'm so amazed that nobody else ever heard of it. When I told my friends I was going to direct it in Czechoslovakia, they said, `Listen, don't panic, we're coming with you.' So it's all nepotism. All old friends . . . They would direct me when I had to act.

"I learned that 90 percent of acting is just telling the story. The audience will be very impressed if you try to make every moment meaningful, but it's a pain in the bum. Just tell the damn story! But in the other 10 percent, you've got to do more. You've got to make the audience feel, cry, laugh. You've got to pull something out of yourself, and sometimes you hurt yourself . . . I realized a long time ago that I can handle disappointment. If it doesn't turn out right, OK, fine. But regret? That's for life."

Hoskins likes to recall something that happened when he was a porter at Covent Garden, which "was a convent back in the time of William the Conqueror." He kept going downstairs to fix fuses and he kept seeing a reflection of a woman's face and hands - only, each time, she was in a slightly different place. "I wasn't frightened, I thought it was a trick of the light. But I went upstairs and told the old guy who was working. He said, `You've just seen one of the nuns. As the legend goes, that means you're going to have a lucky life.'

"So here I am, a middle-aged man with a bald head and a broken nose, y'know? And I'm playin' the romantic lead! We're doin' al'right now, aren't we?"