RIP Bob Hoskins

It has been announced that much-loved British actor Bob Hoskins died of pneumonia aged 71 in hospital yesterday (29 Apr).

A Londoner through and through, before Hollywood beckoned, a pair of his most celebrated performances came in two of the great London films of the 1980s: sharp-edged gangster flick The Long Good Friday (1980) and skewed love story Mona Lisa (1986). 

In the former, directed by John Mackenzie, he was terrifying as a cockney crime boss with a short fuse and big ambitions. Released at the dawn of the greed is good decade, it was a mood-of-the-nation movie and a prescient vision of how destructive that culture would prove to be. In the latter, Neil Jordan’s wonderful film noir, often described as the British Taxi Driver, Hoskins won best actor at Cannes and from BAFTA, and received his only Oscar nomination, for playing a racist small-time hoodlum who falls in love with the “thin black tart” he’s asked to chauffeur between her tricks by his old friend (played by Michael Caine).

Both films have knockout endings: below is the wordless acting masterclass from Hoskins in The Long Good Friday.

Famously described as being "like a testicle on legs" by film critic Pauline Kael, Hoskins made the most of his compact frame. “Between me and Danny DeVito, there isn’t a lot of competition,” he once joked when asked about his success in Hollywood. As well as playing bullish hard men (a persona he would parody in his "it's good ta tawk" BT ads), he showed his brilliant comic timing as a sarcastic heating engineer in Brazil (1985) and in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), where he played a Sam Spade-like PI trying to clear the name of the eponymous bunny. What makes his performance in the latter all the more remarkable is that he spends most of the movie acting and reacting against actors who would only be painted in post-production.

He had memorable turns in two other kid’s movies, Super Mario Bros (1993) and Hook (1991), and gave a brace of fine performances for Shane Meadows – in a small role in comic gem A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) and as the lead in vibrant social-realist story Twenty Four Seven (1997), in which he played a middle-aged loner who starts a boxing club on the rundown estate to help trouble kids get off the streets, only to lose it all when he goes berserk. He was also very moving in Fred Schepisi’s underrated bittersweet drama Last Orders (2001), in which he shares the screen with old muckers Helen Mirren (who played his wife in The Long Good Friday) and Michael Caine.

Hopkins officially retired in 2012 (his swan song was playing one of the seven dwarfs in Snow White and the Huntsman) after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. He is survived by his wife Linda and his four children.