昨晚從英國報紙知道 Bob Hoskins過世的消息， 到YouTube去看了一些訪談和電影精彩處。
Bob Hoskins, Actor Who Combined Charm and Menace, Dies at 71
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.
As soon as he started acting, he said, he knew it was for him.
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“I
fit into this business like a sore foot into a soft shoe,” he told The
Telegraph in 2009. “But when I started I thought, ‘Christ, I ought to
learn to act now I’m doing this for a living.’ I was a completely
untrained, ill-educated idiot. So I read Stanislavsky, but I thought it
was all so obvious. Same with Strasberg. He just seemed to be saying
look busy. Impress the boss. I soon realized actors are just
entertainers, even the serious ones.”
He would find success on television, in Dennis Potter’s 1978 BBC mini-series “Pennies From Heaven”; onstage, playing Nathan Detroit in the wildly successful 1982 revival of “Guys and Dolls,” directed by Richard Eyre, at the National Theater in London; and on film, in “Mona Lisa” as well as Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” (1985) and Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Cotton Club” (1984), in which he played the British-born gangster Owney Madden.
In
the mid-1990s, however, came projects that he considered the low points
of his career. In one, he replaced Danny DeVito in “Super Mario Bros.,”
a 1993 film he dismissed as “a nightmare.” (He once joked that Mr.
DeVito might play the title role should a movie ever be made about Mr.
Hoskins’s life.) Another disappointment was “The Secret Agent,”
Christopher Hampton’s 1996 adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel. Mr.
Hoskins blamed 20th Century Fox for not adequately supporting the film,
which drew poor reviews.
“I
was very proud of it,” he said in a 1998 interview with the British
newspaper The Independent. “Conrad is merciless. He don’t give you any
sympathy for any of the characters. It’s very slow, it’s very laborious,
but very good.
“Fox
killed it stone dead. I think they thought they were getting a
Victorian James Bond. But if you look at Conrad and you look at me, you
know different.”
He went on to star in “TwentyFourSeven,”
a 1997 film directed by Shane Meadows, a portly and bald man whom Mr.
Hoskins described as his fellow “cube.” He played Alan Darcy, a loner
who organizes idle working-class youths into a boxing club.
It was a role Mr. Hoskins called “a wonderful study in loneliness.”
“To
play a character as tough as this and yet to portray this socially
crippled character was the biggest challenge I’ve had in years,” he
added. “I’ll tell you this. This film is more important to me than
anything I’ve ever done.”
One
of the more widely circulated and humorous anecdotes about Mr. Hoskins
involved a film he wasn’t in at all: Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables” (1987).
During
preparation for filming, Mr. Hoskins had been asked to come to Los
Angeles to talk about playing Al Capone, a part that eventually went to
Robert De Niro. In fact, as Mr. Hoskins told the story, Mr. De Palma was
quite straightforward about the fact that he really wanted Mr. De Niro,
but that Mr. De Niro’s price was creating consternation at Paramount.
Mr. Hoskins was engaged as a backup, in the event the studio could not
come to terms with Mr. De Niro.
Sometime
afterward, Mr. Hoskins received a check for £20,000 and a thank-you
note from Mr. De Palma. “I phoned him up,” Mr. Hoskins recalled, “and I
said, ‘Brian, if you’ve ever got any other films you don’t want me in,
son, you just give me a call.’ ”
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