When Stephen Fry, Samuel L. Jackson, and Helen Mirren stand up at your funeral to pay tribute to you, it seems likely that you’re a very talented actor. Just because an entire generation knows you as Mario Mario (I will never stop being amused by how ridiculous that bit of movie trivia is), or at least pretends they do, it doesn’t mean that you haven’t done a lot of really quite incredible work. It just means that, sometimes, the terrible stuff is what leaves a memorable pop culture imprint. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.

Even the people who say it’s Mario secretly know it’s Eddie Valiant, though. Oh, I’ve seen some of his more prestigious stuff in the years since then—I was too young to have seen it before—but in my heart of hearts, he’s Eddie Valiant, drunken PI who hates ‘toons and ends up clearing one of murder. It’s a weird role, and there’s a lot of skill required for it. And not just because you have to act opposite a tennis ball on a stick or a guy who’ll be edited out in post-production or what have you.

Eddie is in pain. He’s burying it in booze, but he spent a lot of time as a fine, fun-loving guy. Then, his brother was killed by one of the things he loved most in all the world. I mean, think about how you’d feel at that point. It’s impossible not to laugh when you find out how Eddie’s brother died, which is of course the point, but also Bob Hoskins has to sell the role of someone whose beloved brother had a piano dropped on him. He has to deliver the line—how many takes do you think he had to do?

Oh, there are plenty of other roles he’s done that are worth talking about, both comedic and dramatic. Mona Lisa and Brazil and The Long Good Friday and so forth. And if he hadn’t played Eddie Valiant, I probably would’ve gotten to him sooner or later for those. But he would’ve been the kind of person I get to and have to explain to everyone who isn’t a fan of arthouse movies who he was, with again the exception of Mario. And he deserved better than to be remembered as Mario.

It’s also worth noting that Bob Hoskins the man seems to have been a decent guy, from what I’ve read. He had a weird, wild life—there are not a lot of actors who spent two years as a camelherd, after all—and kind of fell into acting as though the career were there, waiting for him to realize it was where he belonged. But it was where he belonged. We all knew it; by the end, so did he. He enriched our childhoods, and is there a better epitaph than that?

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