Bob Hoskins was a north London gob-shite made good, the onetime road digger who made himself a star. He was the psycho-gangster in The Long Good Friday, the doleful bulldog in Mona Lisa and one of the most durable - and durably interesting - actors in British cinema. In good films or bad, Hoskins was impossible to ignore; a foursquare dynamo who always made his presence felt.

So what if balding, bristling Hoskins was never matinee idol material? That was hardly the point. Hoskins came to strike a balance and to set us straight. The critic Pauline Kael billed him as "a testicle on legs", a barbed put-down which nonetheless nailed the man's peculiar, rumble-tumble virility. The actor, meanwhile, was wont to describe himself as "five-foot-six cubic", as if he were as utilitarian as a house-brick. I prefer to see him as a kind of unglamorous cultural cornerstone. Take Hoskins away and the whole structure is weakened.

Acting, he claimed, was the making of him. Brought up in a working-class family in Finsbury Park, he bounced through a mess of odd jobs before stumbling drunk on stage for an audition at London's Unity theatre. His subsequent career appeared to surprise even him, and sent the actor see-sawing between playing baleful pugs and bumbling every-men. He was heartbreaking as the faithless sheet music salesman in Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, purely terrifying as the murderous Harry Shand in The Long Good Friday and quietly affecting as the wayward saint in Shane Meadows's 1997 breakthrough TwentyFourSeven.

Along the way, he found a foothold in Hollywood (appearing in the likes of Mermaids and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) and risked over-exposure with a succession of British Telecom ads that appeared to be loved and loathed in about equal measure. "I can give you 500,000 reasons why I made those adverts," he quipped. "All with the queen's head on 'em."

Hoskins credited his friend Michael Caine for opening the doors for the working-class British actors who followed. Caine, he said, was the revolutionary; the first romantic lead who was allowed to keep wearing his glasses and hang on to his cockney accent and made it possible for a bunch of other talented young upstarts to do the same. And yet, tellingly, in the decades since Hoskins had his heyday, the pendulum has swung right back. The hard nut and the everyman are both out of favour. The front-end of British cinema is again the preserve of the willowy Etonian. And Hoskins, far from being a Johnny-come-lately, has turned out to be an anomaly; a talented hooligan who gatecrashed the system or (in his words) "the wrong name on the right list". We need more wrong names to keep that list right.

Today, nearly five decades after he bounded drunk to the stage, Bob Hoskins has belatedly made his exit. He leaves behind a host of brilliant roles and a memory of a bygone strain of British cinema, one that was full of salt and vinegar, sweetness and rage. His life was extraordinary and his death leaves a gap. It measures five-foot-six cubic and it cries out to be filled.

• A career in pictures

• Bob Hoskins obituary

• This article was amended on 1 May 2014. The earlier version said Bob Hoskins was "Born to a working-class family in Finsbury Park". He was in fact born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, but his family moved to north London when he was two weeks old.