Mona Lisa **** (1986, Bob Hoskins, Cathy Tyson, Michael Caine, Robbie Coltrane) – Classic Movie Review 1178

The 1986 classic Mona Lisa is an outstanding British neo-noir mystery thriller from an on-top-form co-writer/ director Neil Jordan. It is distinguished by a career-best performance of rare and unusual excellence by Bob Hoskins as George, a small-time cockney crook, just out of jail, who finds himself entangled in trouble when he acts as chauffeur to up-market hooker Simone (Cathy Tyson), who leads a high-class but dangerous life. Hoskins is perfectly cast and couldn’t be better.

Hoskins was nominated for several awards for his performance, including the Best Actor Oscar, and he went on to win the BAFTA, the Golden Globe and the Cannes Film Festival awards for Best Actor. But he lost at the Oscars to the sentimental award for Paul Newman in The Color of Money. His Cannes award was tied with Michel Blanc in Ménage (1986).

Hoskins also won the 1987 London Critics Circle film award for Actor of the Year, tied with William Hurt for Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985).

The movie was produced by George Harrison’s excellent HandMade Films company.

Jordan and David Leland’s story and screenplay are both especially powerful and grown-up, profitably focusing on developing the relationship of the two main characters. Tyson responds with another career-best performance, which won her the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress.

The script and star turns combine with the all-round quality performances of a fine ensemble cast to produce an intelligent, exciting and satisfying film that was a deserved cinema smash. Slick-back-haired Michael Caine is on his best form in an extended cameo as a creepy London sex-racketeer with an even creepier name of Denny Mortwell, Hoskins’s ex-boss, while Robbie Coltrane adds some welcome laughs as Hoskins’s buddy Thomas.

Ultimately though, it is Hoskins’s triumph, and it is the film that he will be best remembered for.

Look out for Joe Brown as Dudley, who, along with his Bruvvers band, had nine consecutive British chart pop hits between 1960 and 1963.

Strong language and some scenes of violence.

The cast are Bob Hoskins as George, Cathy Tyson as Simone, Michael Caine as Denny Mortwell, Robbie Coltrane as Thomas, Clarke Peters as Anderson, Kate Hardie as Cathy, Zoë Nathenson as Jeannie, Sammi Davis as May, Rod Bedall as Terry, Joe Brown as Dudley, Pauline Melville as George’s Wife, Hossein Karimbeik as Raschid, John Darling as hotel security, Maggie O’Neill as girl in Paradise Club, Bryan Coleman as Gentleman in mirror room, Robert Dorning as hotel bedroom man, and Perry Fenwick as pimp.

Sadly on 8 August 2012, Hoskins announced his retirement from acting after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2011 and on 29 April 2014 he died from pneumonia, aged 71. In a 40-year film career that runs right back to Up the Front in 1972, he also appeared in The Long Good Friday (1980), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Mermaids (1990), Hook (1991), Mrs Henderson Presents (2005) and Made in Dagenham (2010). His many other films notably include Enemy at the Gates, Twenty Four Seven, Brazil and A Room for Romeo Brass.

Robbie Coltrane died at Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert, Falkirk, on 14 October 2022, aged 72. He is remembered for Scrubbers (1983), Krull (1983), The Supergrass (1985), Defence of the Realm (1985), Absolute Beginners (1986), Mona Lisa (1986), The Fruit Machine (1988), the James Bond films GoldenEye (1995) and The World Is Not Enough (1999), From Hell (2001), and as half-giant Rubeus Hagrid in the Harry Potter films (2001–2011).

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