‘'I'll always work. I won't work for so long. I won't be playing the lead. Playing the lead is a pain in the ass. ‘You're the one who turns up every day and you're there for twelve weeks. With a cameo if you do your job you go on. You can be just as good in three weeks as you can in twelve. This is one of the games that the older you get the more useful you get. A star? I'm not a darling star. WIth me you never know what's coming up. I like that. You never know what's around the corner. It could be anything and that's what attracts me to it. The fact that you can't plan a career, really. ‘I didn't know I had a career until people started telling me. ‘People aren't intimidated by me. I'm surprised after some of the characters I've played. Say I'm having a hot dog, strangers will reach over and eat my chips. All this hard man stuff is false. Look, my face is the result of having plent of mouth and nothing to back it up with.' He says he can't help the rest of him. Although he's been trying since his doctor warned hm a few years ago to lose some weight and get in better shape. ‘I bought one of those skiing things. I don't use it as much as I should. If you can get the sweat going .. get up and do twenty minutes. I'm not one for pumping up iron and all that. If I started doing that I'd look like a darling mushroom. Me, I'm darling broad enough as it is. Im 5ft 6ins cubic. The point is I love good, I love wine, I love drinking. Then I look down and say:'' O dear, darl(ing) them.'' ‘When I walk down the street I always think that I look like Fred Astaire. But then I get a glimpse of myself in the mirror and realise that I'm a short, fat, middle-aged Englishman. With a bald head. How can I be a screen hero?' His mother was a school cook, his father a clerk. He left the lessons at the age of fifteen and started a different education away from school. He washed windows, drove lorries, was a Covent Garden porter, a circus fire-eater (‘keep the flames moving'), steeplejack, a member of the Norwegian Merchant Navy and most amazingly of all a trainee accountant. When he left the facts and figures career he maintains he went walkabout with Bedouins and picked bananas in a kibbutz. ‘Plahnted bahnahnahs, picked bahnahnahs, packed bahnahnahs.' His first acting job had him working in an abbatoir in the stage play ‘Featherpluckers'. He was 25. More than half his lifetime later he's been in some landmark productions like ‘The Long Good Friday', Dennis Potter's ‘Pennies From Heaven' and, with unlikely casting, played Cher 's lover in ‘Mermaids'. ‘I thought it was a good one. Cher cast me. I said:'' Why in the darling world would anybody cast me as their lover?'' She said:'' I wanted a fellow who looked like he ate a lot and went to football games. ‘' ‘ Hoskins grins and asks:'I do, don't I? ‘As soon as I met with her it was a go. Everybody wants to have a got at her but basically she's nothing like the image. She's not a great sort for me falling all over her and all that. She doesn't want to know that. Once she realised I wasn't going to go ga-ga and try and get hold of her drawers we were fine. We had a great time.' But he is not a good time boy away from home. ‘I think the closest I am to any woman's sex symbol is a teddy bear that talks -- you get a teddy bear you can have a chat with in bed. |
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