The Death Of Bob Hoskins - TTY

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2014/apr/30/bob-hoskins-dies

Bob Hoskins was a north London lout made good, the onetime road digger who made himself a star. He was the psycho-gangster in The Long Good Friday, the doleful bulldog in Mona Lisa and one of the most durable - and durably interesting - actors in British cinema. In good films or bad, Hoskins was impossible to ignore; a foursquare dynamo who always made his presence felt.

So what if balding, bristling Hoskins was never matinee idol material? That was hardly the point. Hoskins came to strike a balance and to set us straight. The critic Pauline Kael billed him as "a testicle on legs", a barbed put-down which nonetheless nailed the man's peculiar, rumble-tumble virility. The actor, meanwhile, was wont to describe himself as "five-foot-six cubic", as if he were as utilitarian as a house-brick. I prefer to see him as a kind of unglamorous cultural cornerstone. Take Hoskins away and the whole structure is weakened.

Acting, he claimed, was the making of him. Born to a working-class family in Finsbury Park, he bounced through a mess of odd jobs before stumbling drunk on stage for an audition at London's Unity theatre. His subsequent career appeared to surprise even him, and sent the actor see-sawing between playing baleful pugs and bumbling every-men. He was heartbreaking as the faithless sheet music salesman in Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, purely terrifying as the murderous Harry Shand in The Long Good Friday and quietly affecting as the wayward saint in Shane Meadows's 1997 breakthrough TwentyFourSeven.

Along the way, he found a foothold in Hollywood (appearing in the likes of Mermaids and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) and risked over-exposure with a succession of British Telecom ads that appeared to be loved and loathed in about equal measure. "I can give you 500,000 reasons why I made those adverts," he quipped. "All with the queen's head on 'em."

Hoskins credited his friend Michael Caine for opening the doors for the working-class British actors who followed. Caine, he said, was the revolutionary; the first romantic lead who was allowed to keep wearing his glasses and hang on to his cockney accent and made it possible for a bunch of other talented young upstarts to do the same. And yet, tellingly, in the decades since Hoskins had his heyday, the pendulum has swung right back. The hard nut and the everyman are both out of favour. The front-end of British cinema is again the preserve of the willowy Etonian. And Hoskins, far from being a Johnny-come-lately, has turned out to be an anomaly; a talented hooligan who gatecrashed the system or (in his words) "the wrong name on the right list". We need more wrong names to keep that list right.

Today, nearly five decades after he bounded drunk to the stage, Bob Hoskins has belatedly made his exit. He leaves behind a host of brilliant roles and a memory of a bygone strain of British cinema, one that was full of salt and vinegar, sweetness and rage. His life was extraordinary and his death leaves a gap. It measures five-foot-six cubic and it cries out to be filled.
 
Awww Mozzer!

What a sad loss :(
 
I sort of want to laugh...but not if he's really sad...so I don't know what to do...

GinaMarie_confused.gif
 
Great tribute

This is one of my favourite scenes ever



Just like the very last scene in Easy Rider, this is a classic. You just know there's no other way this could have ended. He shits himself for two minutes solid on camera.

P.
 
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A tad oxymoronic, but there you go...

The death of Bob Hoskins - true-to-you.net
30 April 2014


Too sad to write anything.
Life is a pigsty.


Morrissey
30 April 2014
Los Angeles.

- - - Updated - - -

By the way, I like this...



P.
 
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One of the greats. I knew he was ill but it's still a shock. Not as big a shock as Joe Strummer's early exit, but still sobering.
 
But you did write something ! And you posted it through the 'puppet-zine' knowing full well it would end up here @ " The online hateful crèche " !
Your not very good at this are you ?
Get to bed Tosserrey you've got some life changing gigs/album coming up and your neck is on the line big time, make no mistake about that, the world is watching you and your childish ways.

Benny-the-British-Butcher
 
Wow! The self-centered clown did not make this about himself, the Royal family, or anyone/anything else he sees as an injustice.
 
But you did write something ! And you posted it through the 'puppet-zine' knowing full well it would end up here @ " The online hateful crèche " !
Your not very good at this are you ?
Get to bed Tosserrey you've got some life changing gigs/album coming up and your neck is on the line big time, make no mistake about that, the world is watching you and your childish ways.

Benny-the-British-Butcher

One week to go until the circus show hit the road again.

Old Tosserrey and the group of village idiots he calls a band are sure to self destruct.

Benny I predict the curtain will drop before he leaves Texas.

Wait with excitement for the pending train wreak.

The Mad Brewer
 
Why is Gary Bushell talking to himself on a fan forum thread re a Morrissey tribute to Bob Hoskins ?

Very bizarre.
Is Benny actually Gary Bushell?
This actually makes sense.
How shocking. And I have actually exchanged something approaching polite conversation with it.
Benjamin, say it aint so.
 
Condolences to my Mozzer. Life is pollution, but at least I've got my ray of sunshine, my Mozzer. :)

Why are you sending condolences to Morrissey? It's inappropriate as he wasn't related to Bob Hoskins.

Are you related to Morrissey? Why do you call him 'my Mozzer'? I can understand you feel you have a personal relationship to his products as a consumer, so i assume you mean "My Mozzer CDs/downloads/t-shirts/concert tickets".
 
the good ones are always taken away,while we are left with the royal family,i await the day they start to pop off.
 
the good ones are always taken away,while we are left with the royal family,i await the day they start to pop off.
Come on Grant, you're beginning to sound like Moz.
The Royal family as individuals are of no consequence whatsoever. It's the institutions that need to go.
Surely you don't wish death on anybody?
 

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