For someone who came into theatre by accident, Bob Hoskins preserved a sort of accidental realism about his performances, even after he made his breakthrough on film in The Long Good Friday.
He was a brilliantly sweaty and physical founder member of the Ken Campbell Roadshow, performing in pubs and clubs with Campbell, Sylvester McCoy, Andy Andrews, Jane Wood and Dave Hill – this was his real training, as he expanded gleefully into macabre and sensational bar-room tales of mischief, murder and dropped trousers.
The Roadshow was admired by the director Lindsay Anderson, who was instrumental in booking these uncouth clowns into the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs. For Hoskins, this led to major casting, in a studio production of Brecht's Baby Elephant and then, on the Court's main stage, in premieres of Edward Bond's Lear (1971) with Harry Andrews, and Charles Wood's Veterans (1972) opposite John Gielgud.
His working-class chippiness served him well as the dustman Alfred Doolittle in Shaw's Pygmalion with Diana Rigg in the West End (Albery theatre, 1974) and a major Royal Shakespeare Company season at the Aldwych (1976), when he brought muscle and earthiness to his performances in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh and Shaw's The Devil's Disciple opposite Tom Conti.
He was a tremendous Bosola, the court gall and villain, in Adrian Noble's revival of The Duchess of Malfi at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, and the Roundhouse, London (1980-81), playing opposite Helen Mirren and Pete Postlethwaite; and a definitive Nathan Detroit in Richard Eyre's Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre (1982).
His last stage appearance came in Pirandello's As You Desire Me at the Playhouse, London (2005), in a new version by Hugh Whitemore, directed by Jonathan Kent, with Kristin Scott Thomas and Margaret Tyzack. It was wonderful to see him on stage again, but the fire was already semi-quenched.
Campbell always thought he could go way beyond being a career gangster.
