Bob Hoskins, the bullet-shaped British film star who brought a singular mix of charm, menace and cockney accent to a variety of roles, including the bemused live-action hero of the largely animated “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,”has died. He was 71.
A spokeswoman, Clair Dobbs, released a statement by his family on Wednesday saying that he had died in a hospital, where he had been treated for pneumonia. No other details were given. A much-honored, Oscar-nominated actor, Mr. Hoskins had announced his retirement in August 2012 after learning he had Parkinson’s disease.
Mr. Hoskins, who had virtually stumbled into acting, found early acclaim as the kind of ruthless British gangster he played in 1980 in his startling breakthrough feature, “The Long Good Friday,”and later in Neil Jordan’s 1986 film “Mona Lisa,” which earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor. But his filmography also included more playful roles. He was the pirate Smee in two variations of “Peter Pan” — Steven Spielberg’s “Hook” in 1991 and the 2011 British television production “Neverland.” He played Cher’s unlikely love match in“Mermaids” (1990). And he voiced Charles Dickens’s Old Fezziwig in the 2009 animated version of “A Christmas Carol,” directed by Robert Zemeckis.
It was Mr. Zemeckis who cast Mr. Hoskins as the cartoon-hating pulp-fictional detective Eddie Valiant in the landmark hybrid “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” in which Mr. Hoskins shared the screen with animated characters, including the voluptuous Jessica Rabbit, voiced by Kathleen Turner.
In a 2009 interview with The Telegraph of London, Mr. Hoskins said his doctor had advised him to take five months off after finishing the film.
“I think I went a bit mad while working on that,” he said. “Lost my mind. The voice of the rabbit was there just behind the camera all the time. You had to know where the rabbit would be at every angle. Then there was Jessica Rabbit and all these weasels. The trouble was, I had learnt how to hallucinate.”
Mr. Hoskins received a number of prestigious acting awards over his four-decade career, including the Bafta award, the Golden Globe and the Cannes Film Festival prize as best actor for “Mona Lisa,” in which he played an ex-convict hired by a crime boss to act as chauffeur and unlikely bodyguard for a high-priced call girl (Cathy Tyson). He also received an International Emmy Award for episodes of “The Street” (2009); the Canadian Genie Award for the director Atom Egoyan’s “Felicia’s Journey” (1999), based on the William Trevor novel; and a Screen Actors Guild nomination as part of the cast of Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” (1995)in which he played J. Edgar Hoover.
Survivors include his wife, the former Linda Banwell; their children, Rosa and Jack; and two children, Alex and Sarah, from his first marriage, to Jane Livesey.
Robert William Hoskins was born on Oct. 26, 1942, in the historic Suffolk town of Bury St. Edmunds, to which his mother, Elsie Lillian, had been evacuated during heavy bombing in World War II. An only child, he was reared in London, where his father, Robert, was a bookkeeper and his mother was a cook at a nursery school.
After leaving school at 15, he worked as a porter, truck driver and window cleaner. He took a course in accounting but dropped out.
Then, in 1968, he accompanied a friend to an acting audition where he was mistaken for a candidate and was asked to read for a part. He was offered the lead.
No comments:
Post a Comment