Toby Stephens was born in 1969 in London. He is the son of actors Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith. He made his acting debut in 1992 in the miniseries “The Camomile Lawn”. He played the villian in the James Bond in “Die Another Day” in 2002. He also starred as ‘Rochester’ in “Jane Eyre” with Ruth Wilson.
TCM overview:
It was perhaps only natural that this second son of Sir Robert Stephens and Dame Maggie Smith should follow in his parents’ stead and pursue a career as an actor. Handsome, dark-haired Toby Stephens began to land key roles in stage and screen productions almost immediately after his 1991 graduation from LAMDA. He first made an impression with British TV audiences co-starring with Jennifer Ehle in “The Chamomile Lawn” in 1992, the same year he debuted on the big screen in “Orlando”.
Stephens went on to a distinguished stage career, joining the Royal Shakespeare Company and becoming the youngest actor with the troupe to undertake the lead in the Bard’s “Coriolanus” (1994). Daring to step into the shadow of Marlon Brando, he tackled the role of Stanley Kowalski opposite Jessica Lange in the 1996 Peter Hall-staged London production of “A Streetcar Named Desire”. His rising status as a leading man was cemented with his turn as Orsino in “Twelfth Night” (1996), Trevor Nunn’s feature adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy, and as Gilbert Markham, the Yorkshire farmer who falls for a married woman, in the small screen version of Anne Bronte’s novel “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (also 1996). Although his next couple of films didn’t fare too well at the box office, Stephens earned mostly good notices for his work, whether playing an early 20th-century photographer in “Photographing Fairies” (1997) or 19th-century men in “Cousin Bette” (1998) or “Onegin” (1999). After making his Broadway debut playing twins in the farcical “Ring Around the Moon” in 1999, the actor was tapped to portray the young incarnation of director-star Clint Eastwood’s astronaut in “Space Cowboys” (2000). That same year, he tried to embody F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elusive titular character in the A&E version of “The Great Gatsby”, but while he cut the proper dashing figure, something was missing in his interpretation of the role. He fared better in his homeland playing a supporting role in the critically-acclaimed BBC2 presentation “Perfect Strangers” (2001) and a return to the stage alongside Dame Judi Dench in “The Royal Family”. Director Neil LaBute tapped Stephens to play a self-serving academic in “Possession” (2002) before the actor landed a part that reach his wide audience yet– the villainous Gustav Graves in “Die Another Day” (2002), the 20th James Bond film. Stephens held his own against Pierce Brosnan as 007, proving one of the more charismatic of the recent Bond bad guys and demonstrating a flair for physical combat in the action-packed fencing sequence with Brosnan.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Imogen Stubbs was born in 1961 in Northumberland. She is a graduate of RADA. Her film debut was in 1982 in “Privileged”. Other movies include “Jack & Sarah”, and “Dead Cool”. On television, she starred in her own series “Anna Lee”.
TCM overview:
A classically-trained, blonde beauty, Stubbs was educated at Oxford (where her classmates included Hugh Grant and director Michael Hoffman) and at RADA. Primarily known in England for her stage performances at the Ipswitch Repertory Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Among her more notable roles include the leads in the musicals “The Boyfriend” and “Cabaret” and such classical parts as Helena in “The Rover” the Queen to Jeremy Irons’ “Richard II” and the title role in George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan”. Stubbs won critical marks for her turn as Stella to Jessica Lange’s Blanche in Sir Peter Hall’s London production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1996-97).
Stubbs made an impressive debut as the reactive title character in the British-French co-production “Nanou” (1987), which briefly featured Daniel Day-Lewis as the heroine’s friend. Subsequently she offered a poignant performance in Piers Haggard’s “A Summer Story” (1988), a period drama which saw her cast as a young woman whose heart is broken by a caddish barrister (James Wilby) and won praise as a seductive Norse princess in Terry Jones’ “Erik the Viking” (1989). She seemed slightly miscast as a Senator’s daughter in her American feature debut, “True Colors” (1991) but bounced back in two 1995 films. She was briefly seen as Richard E Grant’s wife who dies in childbirth in “Jack and Sarah” and was Emma Thompson’s rival for Hugh Grant’s affection in Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility”. Stubbs co-starred as Viola in “Twelfth Night” (1996), directed by her husband Trevor Nunn.
Television has perhaps provided Stubbs with her widest audience. After co-starring in the British miniseries “The Rainbow” (shown in the US in 1989 on A&E), she tackled the lead in a series of TV-movies centering on a former policewoman now working as a private detective. As “Anna Lee”, Stubbs garnered critical praise and positive comparisons with Helen Mirren’s “Prime Suspect” character, Jane Tennison. To date, six installments have been aired in the US on A&E.
An Indian-born, British trained character actor, Seth began his career after graduating from LAMDA in the late 1960s. He worked as an actor and director in British repertory before landing a role in Peter Brook’s version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” which toured the USA in 1972. He made brief appearances on US TV shows and made his feature film debut in Richard Lester’s “Juggernaut” (1974). Because of his ethnicity, roles in classical productions were scarce and Seth decided to retire from acting and returned to India to pursue a career as a journalist and editor.
At the urging of Richard Attenborough, Seth returned to acting as Pandit Nehru in the biopic “Gandhi” (1982). Around the same time, playwright-director David Hare was casting the lead in his new play “A Map of the World” and he persuaded Seth to create the role of Victor Mehta, a sardonic and celebrated Indian author, first performed in Australia, then London and finally in NYC. Following the success of “Gandhi” and the stage role, Seth was cast as the duplicitous aide-de-camp of the young potentate in Steven Spielberg’s “Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom” and also appeared in David Lean’s “A Passage to India” (both 1984). Other roles followed including Mr. Pancks in Christine Edzard’s epic adaptation of “Little Dorrit” (1988), “Mountains on the Moon” and “1871” (both 1990). In 1991, Seth was a sympathetic Iranian in “Not Without My Daughter” and was the traditional-minded and racially intolerant father of a young girl in love with an African American in Mira Nair’s “Mississippi Masala”. In “Streetfighter” (1994), he was a biophysicist held captive by an evil dictator (Raul Julia).
In 1985, Seth began a collaboration with writer-director Hanif Kureishi. He played the left-leaning journalist father of a Pakistani youth (Gordon Warnecke) in Stephen Frears’ “My Beautiful Laundrette”, written by Kureishi. Six years later, he co-starred in Kureishi’s uneven feature directorial debut “London Kills Me” (1991) as the owner of a Sufi center. He reteamed with the screenwriter again for the four-part BBC TV miniseries “The Buddha of Suburbia” (1993) in which he played the father of the central character.
Norman Rodway was born in Dublin in 1929. He made his stage debut in 1953 at the Cork Opera House in “The Seventh Step”. His films include “This Other Eden” in 1959, “Four in the Morning”, “Chimes at Midnight” and “The Penthouse”. He died in 2001.
Dennis Barker’s “Guardian” obituary:
In the opinion of a new friend, the actor Norman Rodway, who has died aged 72 following a stroke, was “a bit of a rascal in the nicest possible way – the only little boy I know who is over 70”.
On stage, on television and on the big screen, he was often a professional Irishman, one who could play the gnarled Captain Jack Boyle in Sean O’Casey’s Juno And The Paycock, alongside Judi Dench, without anyone questioning his Irishness. Indeed, one of his first parts in London was the hero of James Joyce’s Stephen D, a pot-pourri of Joyce’s writings in which Rodway was well able to suggest the tensions existing in a Catholic Irishman half wanting to break free of his past.
In fact, he was born neither Catholic nor Irish, but was the son of a middle-class English father whose firm happened to send him to a post in Dublin just prior to his birth. His “Irishness” could nevertheless sometimes complicate things for his agent Scott Marshall when finding him non-Irish parts.
At Dublin high school, the youthful Rodway made his debut in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, singing soprano. The following year, he appeared in a leading part in The Gondoliers, as a dressed-to-kill girl in black wig, crimson lipstick, heavy mascara and a 44-inch bust. This brought him his first encore at the end of the first act. By now, he knew that he wanted the stage to be his career.
Any impression of effeminacy that his soprano roles might have fostered at school was undercut by the fact that Rodway also starred as cricket captain, with top batting and bowling averages. His father had two private enthusiasms – cricket and opera – and had seen to it that his son was liberally exposed to both. At the age of nine, Rodway remembered practising his batting strokes against his father’s bowling in their back garden at Malahide, after which they went to his father’s study to listen to opera on the radio.
Cricket, and any branch of theatre, were to remain his enthusiasms, and his short, stocky frame, lantern jaw and piercing eyes were to make him especially adept at playing rascally or threatening parts, from Richard III, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, to Hitler, in the television psycho-drama The Empty Mirror, in which the dictator survived the war and had to face his crimes.
After winning a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, where he took an honours degree in classics, Rodway spent a year teaching, a year lecturing, and even a very short time in the cost accountancy department of Guinness. While enduring these mundane ways of earning a living, he was also acting on a semi-professional basis in Dublin, where the line between professional and amateur tended to be more flexible than in Britain.
In 1953, he appeared in the first production by the newly-formed Globe Theatre Company, and was soon running the group with Jack McGowran and Godfrey Quigley, until they hit the financial skids eight years later. Fortunately, he had not severed all contact with London, where both his parents came from. He appeared in a Royal Court Theatre production of Sean O’Casey’s Cock-A-Doodle Dandy and, in 1963, settled in the capital permanently.
New things were happening in British theatre, and one of the people making them happen was John Neville, who ran the new Nottingham Playhouse and who invited Rodway to appear as Lopakin in his production of The Cherry Orchard. Three years later, Rodway joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, the beginning of a long association that saw his larger-than-life persona being used to best advantage.
After seeing the Laurence Olivier film version of Richard III 10 times, and watching Ian Holm on stage five times, Rodway took the leading role in Terry Hands’s 1970 production with such force that one critic commented that his performance, crowning a recent series of grotesque roles, was directly satanic – a spirit of evil driven on his course by self-loathing and, in particular, by loathing for his own body. “He is as ridiculous as he is villainous, and never more so than when he claps an outsize crown on that shaven bullet head.”
Rodway’s flare for arresting effects was perhaps better suited to the stage than to the cinema, but he appeared in many varying roles on the big screen, and even survived playing Hotspur in Chimes At Midnight (1966), in which Orson Welles both directed and played a Falstaff extracted from several Shakespeare plays. Rodway noticed that as shooting went on, Welles’s part got bigger and bigger, while his own got smaller and smaller. As always, Welles also periodically ran out of money, so that at one stage the film was impounded in a Spanish bank vault as a security for a debt.
The following year, as if paying tribute to his own stamina, Rodway appeared with Welles again, this time in I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name, with director Michael Winner on hand to prune the less acceptable parts of Welles’s ego. A romantic comedy was not Rodway’s main forte, but he also appeared in a supporting role to Suzy Kendall in Peter Collinson’s The Penthouse, another 60s cult film.
On television, his range was wider than his physical limitations. Apart from playing the dominant role of Hitler in The Empty Mirror, where his flare for outsize presence and gesture made the dictator like something out of a strobe-lit nightmare, he appeared in a number of televised Shakespeare plays, and was also a popular guest for one-off appearances in favourite series. These included Jeeves And Wooster, Miss Marple, Rumpole Of The Bailey, The Protectors and Inspector Morse. He made more than 300 broadcasts for BBC radio, including Brian Friel’s The Faith Healer, for which he won the 1980 Pye Radio Award for Best Actor.
Rodway was married four times, first to the actress Pauline Delany, then to the casting director Mary Sellway, and thirdly to the photographer Sarah Fitzgerald, by whom he had a daughter Bianca. She survives him, as does his fourth wife, Jane, whom he married in 1991.
Michael Pennington writes: Norman Rodway’s laughter came in two registers – a full-throated chuckle and a sort of incredulous trill. It was somehow to do with his conviction that everything was a form of comedy, including tragedy; nothing was more serious than the first, nothing more foolish than the second.
In the theatre, you sometimes catch up with your heroes. The Stephen D that arrived with a bang from Dublin in 1963 was an awesome buccaneer who would become my friend, and I learned that this red-blooded manner hid a spirit almost too delicate and fine – kind and anxious and always on your side. A first-class classical scholar, a pianist who could name every Köchel number in Mozart (but loved his Schubert even better), he was completely unpredictable in his judgment of a performance.
When he was ill and immobilised, his eyes locked on to you and followed you round the room, undeceived at the end, like the Lear he should have played. One of the very greatest radio performers, a Shakespearian to the heart, and a great spirit gone. I hope he’s laughing his laugh.
Norman Rodway, actor, born February 7 1929; died March 13 2001
Rodway, Norman John Frank (1929–2001), actor and theatre producer, was born 7 February 1929 in Dublin, son of Frank Rodway, manager of a shipping agency, and Lilian Rodway (née Moyles). The couple had recently moved to Dublin from London. They settled in Malahide, north of Dublin, where Norman attended St Andrew’s Church of Ireland national school before proceeding to the High School, Harcourt St., and to TCD on a scholarship. An excellent student, he graduated with first-class honours in classics in 1950. After lecturing briefly, he began working for Guinness’s brewery, while taking an accountancy degree. Stage-struck since school, he made his debut in the Cork Opera House in May 1953 as Mannion in ‘The seventh step’, and thereafter took on roles in Barry Cassin’s and Nora Lever’s 37 Theatre Club, where he met his first wife, the actress Pauline Delany, whom he married in 1954. That year he was made director of the recently established avant-garde Globe Theatre Company at the Gas Company Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, and the following year he turned professional actor.
Never an Abbey actor, he appeared frequently at the Gaiety, the Gate, and the Olympia and took leading roles in Christopher Isherwood’s ‘I am a camera’ (1956), and John Osborne’s ‘Epitaph for George Dillon’ (1959). As the Globe’s director, he accepted a play by the newcomer Hugh Leonard, ‘Madigan’s Lock’ (turned down by the Abbey), and played the lead when it opened at the Gate Theatre (where the Globe moved) in summer 1958. Leonard described Rodway as ‘modelled on Olivier, using the same vocal tricks, among them the sudden inflection that informed a moment of villainy with a subtext of sardonic humour’ (Sunday Independent, 18 March 2001). He played the Citizen in Leonard’s ‘A walk on the water’ for the 1959 Dublin Theatre Festival; it was the Globe’s last performance – the theatre shut down shortly afterwards – and Rodway went into partnership with Phyllis Ryan to found Gemini Productions, which produced William Gibson’s ‘Two for the seesaw’, Tom Murphy’s ‘Whistle in the dark’, and Leonard’s ‘The passion of Peter Ginty’, all featuring Rodway.
He scored his first major success as the title role in Leonard’s adaptation from James Joyce (qv), ‘Stephen D.’, which opened at the Gate in the 1962 Dublin Theatre Festival. When the play transferred to the West End, Peter O’Toole offered to play Stephen, but Leonard held out for Rodway, who received rave reviews. However, Leonard noted that T. P. McKenna, who came on in the second act as Cranly, always stole the play: ‘Rodway had every quality except the important one: star quality’ (Sunday Independent, 18 March 2001). For the 1964 Dublin Theatre Festival, Gemini Productions put on Leonard’s new play ‘The poker session’. It transferred to the West End and was not a success, but Rodway, who appeared as the assassin Billy Beavis, was much in demand; he moved to London and in 1966 was taken on by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with which he remained, on and off, till 1980. He rarely returned to Ireland but appeared in the 1971 Dublin theatre festival in Leonard’s irreverent farce ‘The Patrick Pearse Motel’.
In the 1966 RSC season he doubled the roles of Hotspur and Pistol in ‘Henry IV’, and played Feste in ‘Twelfth night’ and Spurio in Tourneur’s ‘The revenger’s tragedy’. Critics praised his intelligence and strong stage presence, helped by his big-boned, athletic physique and a head crowned with thick auburn hair. When he played Mercutio the following season, The Times wrote: ‘Norman Rodway unleashes his full range of grotesque comedy, orchestrating the fantastic tirades with rich pantomime and exhaustively milking the text for bawdy’ (14 September 1967). His first leading role for the RSC as Richard III in Terry Hands’s 1970 production was considered less successful. He generally excelled in supporting roles – particularly comic and Slavic parts. He played his first Chekhov in the Nottingham Playhouse’s ‘The cherry orchard’ in 1965 and was memorable in the RSC’s Gorky and Chekhov seasons (1974 and 1976). A natural choice for Irish roles on the London stage, he was notable as Sir George Thunder in ‘Wild oats’ (1977) by John O’Keeffe (qv), and outstanding as Captain Boyle to Judi Dench’s Juno in Trevor Nunn’s acclaimed production of Sean O’Casey‘s (qv) ‘Juno and the Paycock’ (Aldwych, 1980). The Times praised him for eschewing obvious comedy and cheap laughs.
Rodway had around forty film credits – generally small roles in low-budget films. His early films include This other Eden (1959), Nigel Patrick’s Johnny Nobody (1960), and Anthony Havelock-Allan’s The quare fellow (1962), all set and shot in Ireland. His appearance as Hotspur in Orson Welles’ Chimes at midnight(1966) persuaded Peter Hall to offer him that part in the RSC, and he starred opposite Judi Dench in Four in the morning (1966) which was given the award for best film at the Locarno Film Festival. Later in life, he playerd Hitler in the surreal film The empty mirror (1999).
His television career was more impressive; he had strong supporting roles in numerous series such as ‘Inspector Morse’, ‘Reilly: ace of spies’, ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’, ‘The professionals’, and ‘As time goes by’, and was a stalwart in Jonathan Miller’s productions of Shakespeare for the BBC. However, his greatest success off the stage was on radio, where his rich, expressive voice was much in demand. He appeared in 300 programmes and won a Pye award (the industry’s equivalent of an Oscar) for Brian Friel’s quartet of monologues, ‘Faith healer’, in 1980. His gift for comedy found expression in Alan Melville’s ‘Don’t come into the garden’ (1983) and as Apthorpe in Barry Campbell’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of honour (1974). After heart surgery in 1997 he gave up live theatre, and died, after a series of strokes, in Banbury, Oxfordshire, on 13 March 2001.
Lex Sharpnel was born in 1979 in London. His father is the actor John Sharpnel and his maternal granmother is the iconic actress Deborah Kerr. He is best known for his performance in “K-11” and “The Widowmaker”.
Ron Moody was born in 1924 in London. He is best known for his performance as ‘Fagin’ in “Oliver” in 1968, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Other films include “Flight of the Doves” in 1970. He died in 2015/
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Equipped with a crooked, leering smirk and devilish gleam in his eye, the homely, yet beautifully expressive mug of actor Ron Moody will be most assuredly remembered for one signature role, despite the fact that the talented comedian had much, much more to offer. Carol Channing may have had her Dolly Levi and Yul Brynner his King of Siam, but Moody would become the most delightfully engaging musical villain of all time. The son of a plasterer born in London in 1924, he never gave much of a look at pursuing the acting field until age 29. Prior to that he had only entertained thoughts of becoming an economist or sociologist (trained at the London School of Economics). On his way to becoming a top stand-up and improv revue artist in England (from 1952), he made an inauspicious film bow in 1957 in an unbilled bit. It was the British musical stage that offered him his first taste of stardom with the London company of Leonard Bernstein‘s “Candide” in 1959. It was not a great success, however, but it did lead to the role of a lifetime the following year as Fagin, the loveable, rapscallious pickpocket in the musical version of “Oliver Twist” simply called Oliver!. He later bandied about in other roguish roles too in such TV series as The Avengers (1961). In 1968, Ron transferred the Dickensian thief to film, Oliver! (1968), and stole a well-deserved Oscar nomination as well, not to mention major Hollywood interest. His portrayal of Uriah Heep in a TV version of Charles Dickens‘s David Copperfield (1969) was also a great success. He went on to play other more contemporary roles, both straight and sharply comic, but Fagin would be his lasting claim to fame.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Lisa Daniely was born in Reading, Berkshire in 1930. She had the title role in “Lili Marlene” in 1950 with Stanley Baker. Other movies include “The Man in the Road” and “The Middle Course”. She died in 2014.
Her Guardian obituary by Anne Kavanagh is as follows:
My friend Lisa Daniely, who has died aged 84, was a familiar face in the films of the 1950s and 60s. She also appeared on stage and continued working as an actor well into her late 70s.
She was born Elizabeth Bodington in Reading, Berkshire, to an English solicitor father and a French mother. She was educated in Paris, where she trained at the Sarah Bernhardt theatre, and made her film debut in 1950 at the age of 21 in the title role of Lilli Marlene. Her film-star looks were on the cover of Picturegoer the following year. Her notable films included High Jump (1959) with Richard Wyler (who also acted under the name Richard Stapley), The Lamp in Assassin Mews (1962) with Francis Matthews, Stranger in the House (1967) with James Mason and Geraldine Chaplin, and, perhaps most famously, Hindle Wakes (1952) with Leslie Dwyer.
On the stage she played Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard, the title role in Hedda Gabler, and Mrs Alving in Ghosts, as well as using her considerable gifts for comedy as Lady Sneerwell in School for Scandal and Rebecca Huntley-Pike in Chorus of Disapproval.
Her many television roles included Madeleine Issigri in The Space Pirates episodes of Doctor Who, the sister of Peter Brady in The Invisible Man (1958) and alongside Jeremy Brett in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-85). In 1996, she played the Queen in the television film Princess in Love.
Her distinctive, sexy voice never left her, and in her late 70s she made radio recordings of Sapphire and Steel with David Warner and Susannah Harker, and recorded audio books, including Trouble for Lucia by EF Benson.
Fascinated by the craft of writing, she wrote her own one-woman show about Anne-Josèphe Théroigne de Méricourt, whose extraordinary life led her from the fields of Belgium to the barricades of revolutionary Paris at the head of a ragged band of sans-culottes. Lisa mounted a highly successful production of this piece at the Edinburgh festival and was working on turning the script into a novel when she died. It was typical of her to have identified so much with this historical character, whose feistiness, love of life and courage echoed her own.
She took up singing late in life with zest – and, typically, was exploring the internet with determination in her 80s.
She was married to the actor Grey Blake, who died in 1971. She is survived by a stepson, Sean Blake, a niece and two nephews.
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
“He’s a character man. Nature made him thus. When you see a photograph you can (if you know him) hear his loud north London voice, not a pretty thing. But he does not always use his voice in that way: he can change, as varied an actors as films have ever seen. His work has a quality of rawness, of hurt, of awareness that suddenly this – fame, success – will disappear. Working-class actors like Hoskins seldom get to the top branches of show business. They may, in the clarified terms of British cinema, be clowns or comics but never a leading man. Michael Caine is another exception, and in his case a look of surprise permeated his early performances. Hoskins is a more rounded performer, if usually cast in strong roles. In the U.S. he has been compared to Edward G. Robinson and George C. Scott: comparisons in Britain would be James Mason or Oliver Reed, both of whose careers were very different.” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The Independent Years”. (1991).
Bob Hoskins was born in Bury St Edmonds, West Suffolk in 1942. A popular character actor, he became a star in 1980 with his performance as the East End gangster in “The Long Good Friday”. His other movie credits include “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, “Neverland” and “Mona Lisa”. He announced his retirement from acting in 2012. He died in 2014.
Ryan Gibney’s “Guardian” obituary:
Plenty of better-looking performers than Bob Hoskins, who has died aged 71 of pneumonia, have found themselves consigned to a life of bit parts. Short, bullet-headed, lacking any noticeable neck, but with a mutable face that could switch from snarling to sparkling in the time it took him to drop an aitch, Hoskins was far from conventional leading-man material. In his moments of on-screen rage, he resembled a pink grenade. But he was defined from the outset by a mix of the tough and the tender that served him well throughout his career.
As the beleaguered, optimistic sheet-music salesman in the BBC series Pennies from Heaven (1978), written by Dennis Potter, he was sweetly galumphing and sincere. Playing an ambitious East End gangster in The Long Good Friday (1980), he added an intimidating quality to the vulnerability already established. Hoskins could be poodle or pitbull; as a reluctant driver for a prostitute in Mona Lisa (1986) and a patiently calculating murderer in Felicia’s Journey (1999), he was a cross-breed of the two. No other actor has a more legitimate claim on the title of the British Cagney.
When international success came in the mid-1980s, Hoskins made not the least modification to his persona or perspective, maintaining the down-to-earth view: “Actors are just entertainers, even the serious ones. That’s all an actor is. He’s like a serious Bruce Forsyth.”
Born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and raised in north London, he was the only child of Robert, a bookkeeper, and Elsie, a teacher and school cook. Bob left school at the age of 15 and took various jobs – bouncer, porter, window cleaner, fire-eater – after dropping out of an accountancy course. Accompanying a friend to an audition at the Unity theatre, London, in 1968, Hoskins landed a part. He acted in television and theatre in the early 1970s; Pennies from Heaven, filmed shortly after the acrimonious collapse of his marriage to Jane Livesey, secured his reputation and showed him to be an actor as deft as he was vanity-free (he likened himself in that musical drama to a “little hippopotamus”).
In The Long Good Friday, he showed the charismatic swagger necessary to fill a cinema screen, though it was the picture’s final shot – a protracted close-up of Hoskins’s defiant face – that sticks most indelibly in the memory. In 1981, he played Iago opposite Anthony Hopkins in Jonathan Miller’s BBC adaptation of Othello and also met Linda Banwell. The following year she became his second wife, and the person he would credit with helping him survive periods of depression. He wrote a play, The Bystander, inspired by the nervous breakdown he suffered after his first marriage ended.
For more than a decade, he did little television; there were only a handful of exceptions, including some ubiquitous television commercials for British Telecom in which he delivered the catchphrase “It’s good to talk”. He concentrated predominantly on his film career. Highlights included his playful odd-couple double act with Fred Gwynne in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984), and his portrayal of a down-at-heel businessman wooing an alcoholic piano teacher (Maggie Smith) in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987). He was amusing in a cameo as a heating engineer in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and as a coarse screenwriter in the comedy Sweet Liberty (1986), one of four films he made with his friend Michael Caine.
oskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/REX
Hoskins’s pivotal roles in that period could not have been more different. Playing the belligerent but kind-hearted ex-con in Mona Lisa, Neil Jordan’s London film noir, won him many awards (including a Golden Globe and the best actor prize at Cannes), as well as his only Oscar nomination. A year later, he took on his greatest technical challenge in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Robert Zemeckis’s fusion of live action and animation, in which Hoskins was one of the film’s few flesh-and-blood participants.
In the wake of the film’s success, he worked widely in Hollywood: with Denzel Washington in the comic thriller Heart Condition, and Cher in Mermaids (both 1990) and playing Smee (a role he reprised on TV in the 2011 Neverland) in Spielberg’s Hook (1991). The chief catalyst of his disillusionment with Hollywood was his work on the disastrous 1993 videogame spin-off Super Mario Bros. His parts in US films were intermittent thereafter, and included playing J Edgar Hoover in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995). “You don’t go to Hollywood for art,” he said in 1999, “and once you’ve got your fame and fortune – especially the fortune in the bank – you can do what you want to do. It’s basically fuck-you money.”
Hoskins directed two undistinguished features – a fable, The Raggedy Rawney (1988), and the family film Rainbow (1995) – but claimed: “I just got fandangled into it.” If it is true that, in common with Caine, he made too many films purely for the money, it is also the case that he never lost touch entirely with his own talents. Although he dredged up his brutal side on occasion, such as in the action thriller Unleashed (2005), tenderness predominated in later years. He played a wistful boxing coach in Shane Meadows’s Twenty Four Seven (1997), and appeared alongside his Long Good Friday co-star, Helen Mirren, in the bittersweet 2001 film of Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders, about a group of friends scattering the ashes of their dead chum (played by Caine).
He co-starred with Judi Dench in Stephen Frears’s Mrs Henderson Presents (2005) and played a loner coming late to love in Sparkle (2007), as well as a sympathetic union rep standing up for Ford’s female employees in Made in Dagenham (2010).
In 2012, at 69, he announced his retirement after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. His last screen role came as one of the seven dwarves in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), in which his face was superimposed on another actor’s body. But he was characteristically subtle as a publican standing up to thugs in Jimmy McGovern’s BBC series The Street (2009), for which he won an International Emmy award.
Hoskins is survived by Linda; their children, Rosa and Jack; and Alex and Sarah, the children of his first marriage.
• Robert William Hoskins, actor, born 26 October 1942; died 29 April 2014
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
