Anthony Hopkins
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- For the composer, see Antony Hopkins.
Sir Anthony Hopkins, CBE (IPA: ['æntəni 'hɒpkɪnz]) (born December 31, 1937) is an Academy Award-winning Welsh-born film and stage actor.
Background
He was born Philip Anthony Hopkins in Margam, near Port Talbot, Wales. His parents were the late Richard Arthur Hopkins and Muriel Yeats, a distant relation of poet William Butler Yeats.His schooldays were unproductive. A loner with dyslexia, he found that he would rather immerse himself in art, such as painting and drawing or playing the piano, than attend to his studies. In 1949, to instill some discipline, his parents insisted that he attend West Monmouth boarding school in Pontypool. He remained there for five terms, of which Hopkins does not have fond memories. He was then educated at Cowbridge Grammar School.
Hopkins was influenced and encouraged to become an actor by fellow Welshman Richard Burton, whom he met briefly at the age of 15. To that end, he enrolled at the College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, from which he graduated in 1957. After a two-year spell in the army, he moved to London where he trained at RADA, at the suggestion of Roy Marsden.
In 1965, after several years spent performing and honing his craft in repertory, he was spotted by Laurence Olivier, who invited him to join the National Theatre. Hopkins was given the opportunity to be Olivier's understudy, and got his chance to shine when the actor was struck down with appendicitis during a production of August Strindberg's The Dance of Death.
Olivier later noted in his memoir, Confessions of an Actor:
"A new young actor in the company of exceptional promise named Anthony Hopkins was understudying me and walked away with the part of Edgar like a cat with a mouse between its teeth."
Despite his success at the National, Hopkins tired of repeating the same roles nightly and yearned to be in movies. In 1968, he got his break in The Lion in Winter playing Richard I. Although for a while he continued in theatre (most notably in the Broadway production of Peter Shaffer's Equus) he gradually moved away from it to become more established as a television and film actor. He has since gone on to enjoy a long career, winning many plaudits for his performances.
He was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1987, and a Knight Bachelor in 1993. In 1996 Hopkins was awarded an honorary fellowship from the University of Wales, Lampeter.
Today, Hopkins also takes time to support various philanthropic groups. He was a Guest of Honour at a Gala Fundraiser for Women in Recovery, Inc., a Venice, California-based non-profit organisation offering rehabilitation assistance to women in recovery from substance abuse. He is also a volunteer teacher at the Ruskins School of Acting in Santa Monica, California, where he resides.
He has offered his support to various charities and appeals, notably becoming President of the National Trust's Snowdonia Appeal, raising funds for the preservation of the Snowdonia National Park and to aid the Trust's efforts to purchase parts of Snowdon. A book celebrating these efforts, Anthony Hopkins' Snowdonia, was published together with Graham Nobles.
In 2006, Hopkins was the recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement.
Hopkins has been wed three times. His first two wives were Petronella Barker (1967–1972) and Jennifer Lynton (1973–2003). He is now married to Colombian-born Stella Arroyave. He has a daughter, Abigail Hopkins (born 1968), from his first marriage who is an actress and singer.
Hopkins now resides in the United States. He became a naturalised citizen on April 12, 2000. He celebrated this achievement with a 3,000-mile road trip across the country. However, as a dual national, he retains his knighthood and uses the title 'Sir' in the UK. He has never used it in the U.S., even before he became a citizen. In common with other British theatrical knights, the title is omitted for professional credits.
Hopkins is an acknowledged former alcoholic who has been sober since 1975.
Acting style
Hopkins is renowned for his thorough preparation for roles. He has confessed in various interviews that once he has committed to a project, he will go over his lines as many times as are needed (sometimes upwards of 200) until the words are so ingrained in his memory that he can "do it without thinking". This leads to a very natural, almost casual, style of delivery that belies the amount of groundwork done beforehand. It has also brought him into conflict with the occasional director who departs from the script, or demands what the actor views as an excessive number of takes. In addition, he is a gifted mimic, adept at turning his native Welsh accent into whatever is required by a character. It was Hopkins who duplicated the voice of his late mentor, Laurence Olivier, for additional scenes in Spartacus in its 1991 restoration.Hannibal Lecter
His most famous role is the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1992) opposite Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, who also won for Best Actress. In addition, the film won Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. At the time, it was the shortest lead acting Oscar-winning performance ever, as Hopkins is only on screen for about 16 minutes.
He reprised the role twice, in Hannibal and Red Dragon. The character first appeared in the film Manhunter, played by Brian Cox. Since Red Dragon was a remake of Manhunter, it allowed Hopkins to play the iconic villain in adaptations of all three of the best-selling Lecter novels by Thomas Harris. The author was reportedly very pleased with Hopkins' portrayal of his antagonist.
While Hopkins has appeared in many critically and commercially successful films since his turn in Silence of the Lambs, Lecter is undoubtedly his most famous character, and the one with which he has made the biggest impact on American popular culture. Indeed, Hopkins' performance served largely as the template for the modern film portrayal of serial killers as cunning master criminals who play "cat and mouse" with their victims and the police.
Other work
Hopkins has also been Oscar-nominated for The Remains of the Day (1993), which was based on the award-winning novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Other such performances include Nixon (1995) and Amistad (1997). He also won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor for The Silence of the Lambs and The Remains of the Day. The year of the latter (1994), he received a second nomination in the same category for Shadowlands.He has played many famous historical and fictional characters including:
John Quincy Adams (Amistad, 1997), William Bligh (The Bounty, 1984), Charles Dickens (The Great Inimitable Mr Dickens, 1970), John Frost (A Bridge Too Far, 1977), Bruno Hauptmann (The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, 1976), Abraham Van Helsing (Bram Stoker's Dracula, 1992), Adolf Hitler (The Bunker, 1981), C.S. Lewis, (Shadowlands, 1993), David Lloyd George (Young Winston, 1972), Frederick Treves (The Elephant Man, 1980), Richard Nixon (Nixon, 1995), Othello (Othello, 1981), Pablo Picasso (Surviving Picasso, 1996), Quasimodo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1982), Yitzak Rabin (Victory at Entebbe, 1976), Richard Lionheart (The Lion in Winter, 1968), Titus Andronicus (Titus, 1999), and Zorro (The Mask of Zorro, 1998).