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“And that’s the story” – R.I.P. Bob Hoskins

Like many people, I was saddened today to read of the passing of Bob Hoskins, the great British actor who over four decades proved to be equally adept in small-scale home-grown productions and in big-budget Hollywood fare. Hoskins had retired in 2012 after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

I usually don't write about news stories since I tend to think there are sources better able to report news as it breaks. However, Hoskins has been one of my very favourite actors for almost as long as I can remember, and this news has affected me in a way that I wasn't anticipating. As such, I wanted to put down my thoughts about Hoskins as an actor, and why I will dearly miss his presence in film and television.

As someone who was born in the '80s and grew up in the '90s, I was too late to catch some of Hoskins' earliest triumphs, such as his performance as the lead in Dennis Potter's TV series Pennies From Heaven (a role which was later played by Steve Martin in the ill-fated film adaptation), until I started to dig through his filmography at a much later date. As such, my first exposure to Hoskins, as was probably the case for most people of my generation, was his role as the Toon-hating detective Eddie Valiant in Robert Zemeckis's hugely successful, ground-breaking animation-live action hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Growing up, Who Framed Roger Rabbit was one of my favourite films, a fact that seems in some ways completely understandable yet utterly baffling in retrospect. Considering that much of the first eight years of my life were taken up chain-watching Disney movies and Warner Bros. shorts, it makes complete sense that Young Me would have loved a film set in a world in which all of those characters existed not only together, but could also walk around in the real world. I'm pretty sure that I would have moved to Toontown if it was a real place, lax health and safety laws be damned. On the other hand, it's a zany spin on film noir and based (at least in part) on an unfilmed idea for a sequel to Chinatown, neither of which were big reference points in my formative years. Yet this bizarre, hilarious and inventive film ranked alongside Star Wars and Beauty and the Beast as one of the films I watched the most growing up.

When I revisited the film on DVD a few years ago, the thing that struck me - other than how well the effects hold up and how much of the film I completely did not (and kind of wasn't expected to) understand as a child - was just how good Hoskins is, even if his accent occasionally wobbles a little between the West Coast and the East End. The film is based on a crazy premise - it is about someone trying to destroy a cartoon ghetto through shady insider trading in order to build a freeway - but as its human face, Hoskins keeps everything grounded by conveying the anger and bitterness that Valiant feels following the death of his brother at the hands of a mysterious Toon (a role played to unforgettably horrifying effect by Christopher Lloyd. I know of no one who watched the film as a child who was not in some way horribly marked by the words, "Remember me, Eddie? When I killed your brother; I talked, just. Like. THIS!"). He plays the character pretty straight, even when he's making up a song in order to trick animated weasels into dying from laughter, and the sadness of Eddie struck a chord with me both as a child and as an adult. It's a much angrier performance than you would expect in a film aimed at children, but it's also essential to the film's inviting mix of cartoonish slapstick and murder mystery.

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