Hoskins won an international Emmy for best actor for The Street[GETTY]It didn't need to - people assumed he was the same as his hard-man persona.
"The great thing about The Long Good Friday," he once said about one of his most famous roles as an East End gangster, "is that it's fantastic for road rage.
If anyone gets out their car and wants to have a fight they suddenly look at me and see themselves hanging up on a meat hook and soon bottle out of it."
One interviewer recalled taking the lift with Hoskins when it stopped to let in a middle-aged couple.
When they saw Hoskins they backed away in terror.
Who knows how they might have reacted had they known that as a teenager Hoskins had met the Krays?
His mother Elsie, a cook and nursery school teacher, had taught him, "If somebody doesn't like you, **** 'em. They've got bad taste."
Hoskins stuck to her advice.
When one writer accused him of taking the easy money and degenerating into "a global Cockney" Hoskins responded with a terse, "I do what I wanna do," bracketed by several F-words.
When critic Tom Paulin said the "It's good to talk" TV ads Hoskins made for BT could be summed up as "Use the phone more or I'll come round and beat you up" Hoskins declared, "I can give you half a million reasons [for making the ads] - and all with the Queen's head on."
Though he garnered a shelf-load of awards including a Bafta, a Golden Globe and an International Emmy he had scant regard for his profession, dismissing actors as a "bunch of kids playing cowboys and Indians" and cared even less about his image.
"I have not got the faintest idea what my image is," he said.
"I am not interested.
"What the **** do I care?"
Asked who his hero was he did not name Olivier or Edward G Robinson or even his good friend Michael Caine but described a long-ago passing encounter at Victoria station in London with a girl in leg irons who was setting off to backpack around the world.
"She's been my hero ever since, the only hero I've ever had," said Hoskins.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was a huge hit [REX]I have not got the faintest idea what my image is
Robert William Hoskins was born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk on October 26, 1942, but two weeks later his parents moved to Finsbury Park, north London.
One of his grandmothers was a Romany which possibly explained his swarthy looks.
Hoskins' father, also Robert, was a clerk for Pickfords Removals and a committed communist.
Bob left school at 15 with a single O-level and began studying to be an accountant like his father but dropped out and drifted through a series of jobs.
They included packing bananas on an Israeli kibbutz, driving lorries, cleaning windows, joining the Norwegian merchant navy, working as a porter in Covent Garden and bizarrely herding camels in Syria.
His entrée into acting was the stuff of farce. One evening in 1969 he was in the bar of the Unity Theatre near King's Cross waiting for his friend Roger Frost, who was auditioning for a play called The Feather Pluckers.
Someone handed Hoskins a script and informed him he was up next.
"I was too drunk to argue so I got on stage and acted my socks off," Hoskins recalled.
He ended up being cast in the lead role with Frost ending up as his understudy.
"Bob was a natural," Frost later recalled.
"He just got up on stage and was brilliant."
Hoskins was already married with year-old son Alex, who was followed in 1972 by his daughter Sarah.
But he worked steadily in rep and acquired a reputation for being willing to do anything, including fire-eating and throwing himself at brick walls.
"In those days we just passed round the hat," he said.
"I had a wife and kid to support so I wasn't going to say no to anything."
His big break came in 1976 with On The Move, an educational series in which he played Alf, an illiterate removal man.
The series had a virtual cult following and suddenly Hoskins was in demand.
Hoskins and his wife Linda Benwell [REX]As one critic put it Hoskins "cornered the market in cheeky Cockney chappies".
The career-making role of gangster Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday in 1980 brought him a second Bafta nomination and launched him into international stardom which he consolidated six years later with Mona Lisa.
In between he was Nathan Detroit in 1981 in Guys And Dolls, the National Theatre's first musical ("The choreographer convinced me I looked like Fred Astaire but I really looked like a little hippo shaking its hooves") and a South American general in The Honorary Consul.
After the latter director Francis Ford Coppola rang to offer him a part in The Cotton Club.
Hoskins thought it was a hoax and shouted, "It's three o'clock in the morning and you've just woken my kid up, you bastard" before hanging up."
Coppola duly rang back at a less ungodly hour.
The actor made an unlikely leading man as he was the first to admit.
In his own words he was "5ft 6in cuboid - the only actor who had to diet and wear lifts to play Mussolini".
But he amassed an impressively varied Hollywood CV including the innovative Who Framed Roger Rabbit with an all-cartoon cast (apart from him) and a liveaction Peter Pan in which he co-starred with Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams. He also wrote and directed The Raggedy Rawney, a gypsy story set in Europe.
He claimed he used the "cold bum test" to choose scripts.
"I take the script to the khazi and if I end up with a cold bum I think, this has got to be good.
"If I notice I've got pins and needles I think **** me, this is a really good one."
He became disillusioned with Hollywood after making Super Mario Brothers.
"I work really hard and they just mess it up," he said.
His early career struggles put paid to his first marriage to Jane in 1978 and when she accused him of being violent he had a nervous breakdown.
He met second wife Linda in 1981.
"I walked into the pub on royal wedding day [Charles and Diana] and there she was and I thought, 'You're mine, darling'."
They wed in 1982 and had children Rosa, now 30, and Jack, 28.
Hoskins was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2011, a year after winning an international Emmy for best actor for The Street.
In August 2012 he announced his retirement.
In recent days he contracted pneumonia and died on Tuesday surrounded by his wife and children in the role he cherished most of all: that of husband and father.
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