Features

Bob Hoskins: a career in pictures

Visual highlights from the films and television of the late, great, British actor Bob Hoskins, star of The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

30 April 2014

Bob Hoskins with Helen Mirren in The Long Good Friday (1980), the defining British gangster film of the Thatcher era
An early role for Hoskins in Jack Gold’s 1973 comedy The National Health, starring Lynn Redgrave and Colin Blakely
Hoskins rose to stardom in the lead role in Dennis Potter’s six-part serial Pennies from Heaven (1978), acclaimed as a television masterpiece
The poster for The Long Good Friday (1980), which turned Hoskins into a big-screen star, playing a ruthless gangland boss and political player. It remains an undisputed peak of the British gangster movie
Hoskins won a BAFTA playing another London gangster in Neil Jordan’s 1986 Mona Lisa, co-starring Michael Caine and Cathy Tyson
The original 1986 poster for Mona Lisa
Hoskins starred alongside Maggie Smith in the Dublin-set period romance The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), adapted from the novel by Brian Moore
Hoskins’ highest-profile Hollywood turn was in Robert Zemeckis’s 1988 mystery Who Framed Roger Rabbit, set in an animated Toontown peopled with characters from animation history
Atom Egoyan’s 1999 film Felicia’s Journey has Hoskins as a middle-aged man who helps an Irish teenager in her search for the boyfriend who made her pregnant
Hoskins was reteamed with Michael Caine, as well as David Hemmings and Tom Courtenay, for the 2001 film Last Orders, about a group of ageing men on a journey to fulfil a late friend’s dying request
Jude Law, Joseph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz and Ed Harris joined Hoskins among a star-studded cast for the wartime epic Enemy at the Gates (2001), set during the Battle of Stalingrad in the Second World War
He played head butler Lionel Bloch in this 2002 hotel-set romantic comedy starring Jennifer Lopez as the eponymous Maid in Manhattan
Hoskins played Vivian Van Damm, the boss of Soho’s Windmill Theatre, in Stephen Frears’ 2005 musical comedy Mrs Henderson Presents, co-starring Judi Dench
Watch Mona Lisa on BFI Player
Watch The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne on BFI Player
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