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"Bob Hoskins announced a few days ago that he has retired from acting at the age of 69 because he is suffering from Parkinson\u2019s Disease. It\u2019s sad to think that no more movies will be jostled by his ebullience or that the flat expanse of his one-0f-a-kind hooter and the gleam in his eyes won\u2019t be seen in stories co-starring much prettier people who could never match his impact.Often he played larger than life characters, including a gallery of historical movers and shakers \u2013 Mussolini, Churchill, J. Edgar Hoover, Krushchev, Manuel Noriega, William Pitt the Elder&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;\u2013&amp;nbsp;and such stout literary staples as Micawber, Smee, Sancho Panza, and Badger in \u201CThe Wind in The Willows.\u201D He was even more memorable as Owney Madden in \u201CThe Cotton Club\u201D and Eddie Valiant, the private eye bamboozled by toons in \u201CWho Framed Roger Rabbit\u201D (for which I would sacrifice all the Shreks), his best-known American films. And, of course, he was capable of menace \u2013 his portrayals of Lavrentiy&amp;nbsp;Beria, Marshal of the Soviet Union and serial rapist, in \u201CThe Inner Circle,\u201D and Eddie Mannix, the MGM \u201Cfixer,\u201D in \u201CHollywoodland,\u201D are chilling.British crime was an obvious milieu for his looks and threatening Cockney demeanor. He was magnetic as the strutting, ruthless old-school gang boss hung out to dry on his manor by more powerful political forces in \u201CThe Long Good Friday.\u201D In the hyperbolic \u201CMona Lisa,\u201D he was more emotional than usual as a gangland underling hired as a minder for a beautiful young black call girl (Cathy Tyson) and bewildered by the love he starts to feel for her; simultaneously, he grows in humanity and attempts to break an underage-prostitutes racket.Asked to be quiet or stealthy, Hoskins exerted self-control as the altruistic organizer of a boxing club for delinquent or unemployed youths in \u201CTwenty Four Seven\u201D (perhaps his most heartbreaking performance), as the very creepy predator of young women in \u201CFelicia\u2019s Journey,\u201D and as the gentle, sympathetic lover of an old mate\u2019s neglected wife in \u201CLast Orders\u201D: the latter movingly reunited him with  Mona Lisa 's Michael Caine and \u201CThe Long Good Friday\u201D\u2019s Helen Mirren. He was an actor unafraid to strip off, at age 62, amid so much female pulchritude in \u201CMrs. Henderson Presents.\u201DSo Hoskins has been agile and original, despite a physique and a roughness that might have restricted less versatile actors. Naming his greatest performance is hard given his diversity, but his most definitive is the one in which he may have stretched less than in others: at least in terms of humor, cheek, imagination, and energy.&amp;nbsp; In Dennis Potter\u2019s great six-part, 420-minute BBC miniseries \u201CPennies From Heaven\u201D (1978), Hoskins played a 1930s traveling song-sheet salesman, Arthur Parker, whose romantic delusions and sexual frustration with his prim wife Joan (Gemma Craven) steer him from suburban conformity to the gallows (and beyond).Arthur is  common according to Joan, as well a liar and an adulterer, but he has a touching faith in the messages of the idealistic Depression-era numbers he hawks, which have titles like \u201CThe Clouds Will Soon Roll By,\u201D \u201CDown Sunnyside Lane,\u201D and \u201CLove Is Good for Anything That Ails You.\u201D &amp;nbsp;The series was the first of the three in which Potter had characters suddenly lipsynching to such \u201Ccheap songs,\u201D which in the case of \u201CPennies\u201D he likened to the Psalms for their promise of deliverance, as they interrupt the naturalistic flow of the drama to suggest unspoken yearnings, needs, drives, and regrets. Showing his technical prowess, Hoskins mugs and hoofs his way though many of the songs, sometimes throwing a fourth-wall-breaking look at the camera, then stops abruptly to reenter the story proper. He makes the flow of fantasy and present-tense consciousness seamless.Hoskins brilliantly renders Arthur\u2019s disappointment with his marriage, his absence of moral fiber, his occasional flashes of goodness, and his lust, and still elicits our empathy, most if not all of the time. Arthur finds in a virginal country schoolteacher, Eileen (Cheryl Campbell), the mythical \u201Cgirl in the songs\u201D he yearns for, and seduces and runs off with her. But she is more realistic than he is and less hidebound by morality, and her transformation into a tart and blackmailer \u2013 and worse \u2013 only emphasizes how weak and emotionally ignorant he is.Potter and Hoskins show in Arthur the proximity of goodness and baseness that exists in most human hearts. In one of the most troubling scenes, Arthur sees a radiant blind girl of about 17 in a cornfield. After she has gone on her way, he utters the wish that he could give her sight, but then drops his voice and murmurs to himself another wish \u2013 that he could take her knickers down. The crudity doesn\u2019t negate Arthur\u2019s compassion, but muddies it, revealing his ambiguity. (When it comes to this girl, Kenneth Colley's epileptic tramp, a mad accordion player of hymns, proves to be Arthur's id run amok.)Hoskins intuitively caught the Jekyll and the Hyde in the self-deluding Arthur Parker. He was 35 when he did \u201CPennies From Heaven,\u201D which launched him as a star in Britain. If he never got to do anything quite so complex again, that doesn\u2019t lessen the extent of his achievement.&amp;nbsp;[content:advertisement-center]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/818800/bob-hoskins-retires-a-salute-to-his-seven-finest-hours>