Home Is Where He Wants to Be

After a decade in Hollywood both as a leading man and a distinctive character actor, Bob Hoskins is back home--playing his part in boosting the British film industry.

The diminutive, bulky Hoskins had his moments in Hollywood. He starred in the huge 1988 hit “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” which skillfully blended animation and live action. Implausibly, he was Cher’s love interest in the comedy “Mermaids.” For a Cockney, he was a credible American mobster in “The Cotton Club.” And while “Mona Lisa” was a British film, it took him to Hollywood when he was nominated for a best actor Oscar in 1986.

But recently Hoskins, 54, has come to feel his future lies in Britain. In part this stems from disillusionment with Hollywood’s studio system. The final straw for him was “Super Mario Bros.,” the 1993 film that cast him as a video game character in human form. He arrived on the set to find the script changed radically, and clashed with the directors. He soon decided to kiss Hollywood goodbye.

“I’d been coasting for quite a few years,” says Hoskins, relaxing in the study of his large Victorian home in north London. “And ‘Super Mario Bros.’ really brought it home. It was the one film I did just for money, and it was such an unhappy experience. It was appalling, a joke. It came out the same time as ‘Jurassic Park,’ which buried it. I thought to myself: What am I doing? I’m taking jobs to pay for things which, if I didn’t take the jobs, I wouldn’t have them to pay for. I’m better than this. I can act. I can do the business.”

That much is undeniably true. By the time he made his bow in American films in the mid-’80s, Hoskins had already dazzled in three different media in Britain--on TV as the sheet-music salesman who burst into song in Dennis Potter’s innovative “Pennies From Heaven”; as the riveting, menacing racketeer in “The Long Good Friday,” a rare classic British gangland movie; and triumphantly as Nathan Detroit in the National Theatre’s landmark production of the musical “Guys and Dolls.” With that pedigree, it’s no wonder Hoskins felt he had lost his way by “Super Mario Bros.”

“It was that terrible thing of taking a job you know you wouldn’t have taken the year before,” he recalls. “And you know next year you’ll take one you wouldn’t take now. I’m not thinking in terms of integrity. It’s acting, not life or death. But there are things I do well. And no one was asking me to do anything well. The studios are buying a name I’ve built up from doing things well--but now, what are they buying?”

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So Hoskins has set his sights on Britain, and entered filmmaking as a partner of English producer Norma Heyman (“Dangerous Liaisons,” “Mary Reilly”). Under the Heyman-Hoskins Productions banner, they have produced Joseph Conrad’s classic 1907 novel “The Secret Agent,” about an anarchist group in Edwardian London. Opening in the United States this weekend, it stars Hoskins, Patricia Arquette and Gerard Depardieu and was written and directed by Christopher Hampton.

So how did he assume the mantle of producer? “I read ‘The Secret Agent’ as a kid. It was one of my favorite books. I was driving down to the country a couple of years back, listening to it as a book on tape, with [English actor] Tim Pigott-Smith reading. Tim gave it such a performance! I thought, ‘Ooh, this is a film.’ ”

Hoskins says he is prouder of “The Secret Agent” than anything he has done in years. “It may be a film which never earns a penny, but it’s a film we wanted to make,” he says, grinning. “It really is bleak. I mean, it’s Joseph Conrad, it’s not a Saturday night out with the missus.”

Now, as if deliberately compounding a precarious venture, Hoskins is also returning to the stage after a 15-year absence. He opens Tuesday in the West End in “Old Wicked Songs,” a Pulitzer Prize-nominated play by Jon Marans, which played off-Broadway.

Hoskins portrays an elderly, passionate Austrian voice teacher charged with reinvigorating the life and career of a young, burned-out American piano virtuoso.

“About 40% of the play is music,” Hoskins says tensely. “And I have a voice like a foghorn. Singing ‘Guys and Dolls’ is one thing. Singing Schumann is quite another. And then I have to speak German a fair bit. And the play is nine scenes. In one room.”

He sighs deeply. “It’s such a tough one. Every time I think about doing it, it gives me the horrors.”

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Actors routinely talk of stage fright, but Hoskins means it. “First nights really are first nights for me,” he says morosely, and goes on to describe the many times in which he has thrown up in the wings just before going on stage. “It’ll happen this time, don’t worry.”

He’s also dyslexic, which makes learning lines a real challenge. “I can’t skim a page,” he says. “I have to read every word carefully and individually. It’s slow going. Of course, by the time I get to the bottom of the page, I’ve got a good idea vocally what’s there. I know how the words should sound.”

But he is so accustomed to film work, learning a few lines a day, then forgetting them, that he has struggled to keep two hours of dialogue from “Old Wicked Songs” in his head. Still, he is not currently interested in easy options.

Hoskins gesticulates toward a pile of scripts, piled high at his feet on a low coffee table. “I just keep kicking these,” he says. “Know why? They’re no good. Not one. Think about it. Name one film that’s come out of Hollywood recently that you’ve thought, yessss! There’s one every now and then, but how many [actors] are up for it? And I’m English, not American, so I’m at the back of the queue.”

He thinks Hollywood will once again make grown-up, substantial films with meaty roles: “But in the meantime, what do you do? Sit and wait out the dead period or go and create something yourself? If we start something in Britain, the big names will queue up to do something good. There’s so much talent here. Look at ‘Trainspotting.’ Cracking film. And they made it for nothing. So we can do it.”