Anthony Hopkins

Biography

In 1967 Laurence Olivier was struck with appendicitis in the middle of a performance of August Strindberg’s “The Dance of Death”, and that evening the part of Edgar was played by his understudy. The understudy was Anthony Hopkins, whom Olivier had invited two years earlier to join the company of the Royal National Theatre.

Philip Anthony Hopkins was born on 31 December 1937 in Margam, a suburb of Port Talbot in south Wales, the son of a baker, Richard Arthur Hopkins. He did badly at school, and in lessons he would rather draw or play the piano. In 1949 his parents, hoping for some discipline, sent him to Jones’ West Monmouth Boys’ School in Pontypool, where he stayed for five terms, and he then attended Cowbridge Grammar School in the Vale of Glamorgan. At fifteen he briefly met Richard Burton, also Welsh, and by Hopkins’s own later account the acquaintance was fleeting rather than a friendship. Hopkins enrolled at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff and graduated in 1957. Then came the army: he served in the Royal Artillery from 1958 to 1960. After that he moved to London and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), from which he graduated in 1963. His first professional stage appearance took place in 1960 in Swansea, in the play “Have a Cigarette”.

He stayed at the National Theatre until 1970. He appeared in “King Lear”, “Coriolanus”, “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra”. His first notable film role came in 1968: in “The Lion in Winter”, based on James Goldman’s play, he played the young Richard the Lionheart, and the part brought him a BAFTA nomination. In 1972, in the British television adaptation of “War and Peace”, he played Pierre Bezukhov and won his first BAFTA Award for best actor on television. In the same year he began working with the director Richard Attenborough: they made five films together, from “Young Winston” to “Magic” (1978) and “Shadowlands” (1993).

In 1974 on Broadway he played the psychiatrist Dysart in Peter Shaffer’s “Equus” and received a Drama Desk Award. Later he moved to the United States. In the 1970s and 1980s he worked largely in television films: his two Emmy Awards were for Bruno Hauptmann in “The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case” (1976) and Hitler in “The Bunker” (1981). In those years came David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” (1980), in which he played the surgeon Frederick Treves, and “The Bounty” (1984), in which he was Captain Bligh. In 1985 he won a Laurence Olivier Award for playing the newspaper magnate Lambert Le Roux in David Hare and Howard Brenton’s “Pravda”. He last appeared on stage in 1989 in a London production of “M. Butterfly”, an experience he later recalled with horror.

Fame came with Hannibal Lecter. The director Jonathan Demme wanted a British actor for the part, and for “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) Hopkins won the Academy Award and his first BAFTA Award for a leading role in film. He played Lecter twice more, in “Hannibal” (2001) and “Red Dragon” (2002). Next came “Howards End” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (both 1992), “The Remains of the Day” (1993), for which, as the butler Stevens, he was nominated for an Oscar and won a BAFTA, and then “Shadowlands”, “Legends of the Fall”, “Nixon” and “Amistad”. The story about “Amistad” is often repeated: he memorised a seven-page courtroom speech and delivered it in a single take. This is hard to check against documents, so I would treat it as a piece of crew lore.

As a director he made in 1990 a television film about Dylan Thomas, “Dylan Thomas: Return Journey”, in 1995 “August”, based on Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” and moved to Wales, and “Slipstream”, shown at Sundance in 2007; he wrote the screenplay himself and composed the music. Music has occupied him all his life: the waltz “And the Waltz Goes On”, written in 1964, was first heard in 2011 in Vienna, performed by André Rieu’s orchestra, and in 2012 the album “Composer” was released, recorded by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Hopkins was knighted in 1993, and in 1987 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2003 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in 2006 the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award, and in 2008 the BAFTA Fellowship for his contribution to film. He became a United States citizen on 12 April 2000, keeping his British citizenship. In 1998 he donated a million pounds towards buying land in Snowdonia National Park.

His second Oscar came for playing a man with dementia in Florian Zeller’s “The Father” (2020). At 83 he became the oldest winner of an acting Academy Award. He did not travel to the ceremony and thanked the Academy the next day in a video message from Wales.