Anthony Hopkins

Hopkins was born on New Year's Eve, 1937, in Margam, a suburb of Port Talbot, Glamorgan. His parents were Annie Muriel (née Yeates) and Richard Arthur Hopkins, a baker. He stated his father's working-class values have always underscored his life, "Whenever I get a feeling that I may be special or different, I think of my father and I remember his hands – his hardened, broken hands." His school days were unproductive; 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 discipline, his parents insisted he attend Jones' West Monmouth Boys' School in Pontypool. He remained there for five terms and was then educated at Cowbridge Grammar School in the Vale of Glamorgan. In a 2002 interview he stated, "I was a poor learner, which left me open to ridicule and gave me an inferiority complex. I grew up absolutely convinced I was stupid."

Hopkins was inspired by Welsh compatriot Richard Burton, whom he met at the age of 15. Hopkins recalls, "he was very gracious, very nice". Hopkins promptly enrolled at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff, from which he graduated in 1957. He later said of Burton, "I don't know where everyone gets the idea we were good friends. I suppose it's because we are both Welsh and grew up near the same town [Port Talbot]. For the record, I didn't really know him at all." They next met in 1975 as Burton prepared to take over Hopkins' role as the psychiatrist in Peter Shaffer’s Equus, with Hopkins stating, "He was a phenomenal actor. So was Peter O'Toole – they were wonderful, larger-than-life characters". After two years of his national service between 1958 and 1960, which he served in the British Army, Hopkins moved to London where he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Hopkins made his first professional stage appearance in the Palace Theatre, Swansea, in 1960 with Swansea Little Theatre's production of Have a Cigarette. In 1965, after several years in repertory, he was spotted by Laurence Olivier, who invited him to join the Royal National Theatre in London. Hopkins became Olivier's understudy, and filled in when Olivier was struck with appendicitis during a 1967 production of August Strindberg's The Dance of Death. Olivier later noted in his memoir, Confessions of an Actor, that

Hopkins was nervous prior to going on stage, but since that night he has relaxed, quoting his mentor: "He [Olivier] said: 'Remember: nerves is [sic] vanity – you're wondering what people think of you; to hell with them, just jump off the edge'. It was great advice." Despite his success at the National, Hopkins tired of repeating the same roles nightly and yearned to be in films. He made his small-screen debut in a 1967 BBC broadcast of A Flea in Her Ear. His first starring role in a film came in 1964 in Changes, a short directed by Drewe Henley, written and produced by James Scott and co-starring Jacqueline Pearce. In 1968, Hopkins got his break in The Lion in Winter playing Richard the Lionheart, a performance which saw him nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Although he continued in theatre (most notably at the National Theatre as Lambert Le Roux in Pravda by David Hare and Howard Brenton and as Antony in Antony and Cleopatra opposite Judi Dench as well as 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 portrayed Charles Dickens in the BBC television film The Great Inimitable Mr. Dickens in 1970, and Pierre Bezukhov in the BBC's mini series War and Peace (1972). Making a name for himself as a screen actor, in 1972 he starred as British politician David Lloyd George in Young Winston, and in 1977 he played British Army officer John Frost in the World War II-set film A Bridge Too Far. Both of these films were directed by Richard Attenborough, who described Hopkins as "unquestionably the greatest actor of his generation".

In 1978 he starred in the psychological horror film Magic about a demonic ventriloquist's puppet. In 1980, he starred in The Elephant Man as the English doctor Sir Frederick Treves, who attends to Joseph Merrick (portrayed by John Hurt), a severely deformed man in 19th century London. That year he also starred opposite Shirley MacLaine in A Change of Seasons and famously said "she was the most obnoxious actress I have ever worked with."

In 1983, Hopkins also became a company member of The Mirror Theater Ltd's Repertory Company. He remained an enthusiastic member of the company and the Mirror's Producing Artistic Director Sabra Jones visited him in London in 1986 to discuss moving Pravda to New York from the National Theatre. In 1984, he starred opposite Mel Gibson in The Bounty as William Bligh, captain of the Royal Navy ship HMS Bounty, in a retelling of the mutiny on the Bounty. In 1986 he starred in David Hare’s production of King Lear, Hopkins' favourite Shakespeare play, at the National Theatre. In 1989, Hopkins made his last stage performance in a West End production of M. Butterfly.

Hopkins was appointed a CBE in 1987 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to the arts" at Buckingham Palace in 1993. In 1988, he was awarded an honorary D.Litt. degree and in 1992 received an honorary fellowship from the University of Wales, Lampeter. He was made a freeman of his home town, Port Talbot, in 1996.

In 1990, Hopkins directed a film about his Welsh compatriot, poet Dylan Thomas, titled Dylan Thomas: Return Journey, which was his directing debut for the screen. In the same year, as part of the restoration process for the Stanley Kubrick film Spartacus, Hopkins was approached to re-record lines from a scene that was being added back to the film; this scene featured Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis, with Hopkins recommended by Olivier's widow, Joan Plowright to perform her late husband's part thanks to his talent for mimicry.

Hopkins' won great acclaim among critics and audiences as the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1991, with Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, who also won for Best Actress. The film won Best Picture, Best Director and Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Hopkins also picked up his first BAFTA for Best Actor. Hopkins reprised his role as Lecter twice; in Ridley Scott's Hannibal (2001), and Red Dragon (2002).

Hopkins is a well-known mimic, adept at turning his native Welsh accent into whatever is required by a character. He duplicated the voice of his late mentor, Laurence Olivier, for additional scenes in Spartacus in its 1991 restoration. His interview on the 1998 relaunch edition of the British TV talk show Parkinson featured an impersonation of comedian Tommy Cooper. Hopkins has said acting "like a submarine" has helped him to deliver credible performances in his thrillers. He said, "It's very difficult for an actor to avoid, you want to show a bit. But I think the less one shows the better."

In 1992, Hopkins starred in Merchant-Ivory's period film based on the E. M. Forster novel Howards End. Hopkins acted alongside Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter where he played the cold businessman Henry Wilcox. The film received enormous critical acclaim, with critic Leonard Maltin calling it "extraordinarily good on every level." The following year, Hopkins reunited with Merchant-Ivory and Emma Thompson in The Remains of the Day (1993), a film set in 1950s post-war Britain based of the acclaimed novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. The film was ranked by the British Film Institute as one of the 64th greatest British film of the 20th century. Starring as the butler Stevens, Hopkins named it among his favourite films. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, and received the BAFTA Award for Best Actor.

Hopkins is a prominent member of environmental protection group Greenpeace and as of early 2008 featured in a television advertisement campaign, voicing concerns about Japan's continuing annual whale hunt. He has also been a patron of RAPt (Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoners Trust) since its early days and in 1992 helped open their first intensive drug and alcohol rehabilitation unit at Downview (HM Prison), a women's prison in Surrey, England.

Hopkins portrayed Oxford academic C. S. Lewis in the 1993 British biographical film Shadowlands, for which he was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actor. During the 1990s, Hopkins had the chance to work with Bart the Bear in two films: Legends of the Fall (1994) and The Edge (1997). According to trainer, Lynn Seus, "Tony Hopkins was absolutely brilliant with Bart...He acknowledged and respected him like a fellow actor. He would spend hours just looking at Bart and admiring him. He did so many of his own scenes with Bart."

In 1995, he directed August, an adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya set in Wales. His first screenplay, an experimental drama called Slipstream, which he also directed and scored, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. In 1997, Hopkins narrated the BBC natural documentary series, Killing for a Living, which showed predatory behaviour in nature. He narrated episode 1 through 3 before being replaced by John Shrapnel.

Hopkins was Britain's highest paid performer in 1998, starring in The Mask of Zorro and Meet Joe Black, and also agreed to reprise his role as Dr Hannibal Lecter for a fee of £15 million.

Hopkins 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 Snowdonia National Park in north Wales. In 1998 he donated £1 million towards the £3 million needed to aid the Trust's efforts in purchasing parts of Snowdon. Prior to the campaign, Hopkins authored Anthony Hopkins' Snowdonia, which was published in 1995. Due to his contributions to Snowdonia, in addition to his film career, in 2004 Hopkins was named among the 100 Welsh Heroes in a Welsh poll.

Hopkins contributed toward the refurbishment of a £2.3 million wing at his alma mater, the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff, named the Anthony Hopkins Centre. It opened in 1999.

In 2000, Hopkins narrated How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Hopkins received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003. Hopkins stated that his role as Burt Munro, whom he portrayed in his 2005 film The World's Fastest Indian, was his favourite. He also asserted that Munro was the easiest role that he had played because both men have a similar outlook on life. In 2006, Hopkins was the recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement. In 2008, he received the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award, the highest award the British Film Academy can bestow. In a 2003 poll conducted by Channel 4 Hopkins was ranked seventh on their list of the 100 Greatest Movie Stars.

Hopkins resides in Malibu, California. He had moved to the US once before, during the late 1970s, to pursue his film career, but returned to London in the late 1980s. However, he decided to return to the US following his 1990s success. Retaining his British citizenship, he became a naturalised American citizen on 12 April 2000, with Hopkins stating: "I have dual citizenship; it just so happens I live in America".

Hopkins is an admirer of the late Welsh comedian Tommy Cooper. On 23 February 2008, as patron of the Tommy Cooper Society, he unveiled a commemorative statue in the entertainer's home town of Caerphilly. For the ceremony, he donned Cooper's trademark fez and performed a comic routine.

He gave up smoking using the Allen Carr method. In 2008, he embarked on a weight loss programme, and by 2010, he had lost 80 pounds. In January 2017, in an interview with The Desert Sun, Hopkins reported that he had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, but that he was "high end". Hopkins has a pet cat named Niblo, which he adopted in Budapest.

On 24 February 2010, it was announced that Hopkins had been cast in The Rite, which was released on 28 January 2011. He played a priest who is "an expert in exorcisms and whose methods are not necessarily traditional". Hopkins, an agnostic who is quoted as saying "I don't know what I believe, myself personally", reportedly wrote a line—"Some days I don't know if I believe in God or Santa Claus or Tinkerbell"—into his character to identify with it. In 2011, Hopkins has said, "what I enjoy is uncertainty. … I don't know. You don't know." On 21 September 2011, Peter R. de Vries cast Hopkins in the role of the Heineken owner Freddy Heineken in a future film about his kidnapping. The film Kidnapping Freddy Heineken was released in 2015.

Hopkins portrayed Odin, the Allfather or "king" of Asgard, in the 2011 film adaptation of Marvel Comics' Thor and would go on to reprise his role as Odin in Thor: The Dark World in 2013, and again in 2017's Thor: Ragnarok. Hopkins portrayed Alfred Hitchcock in Sacha Gervasi's biopic Hitchcock alongside Helen Mirren who played Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville. The film focuses on the film of Psycho and that which followed. In 2014, he portrayed Methuselah in Darren Aronofsky's Noah. Hopkins played Autobot ally Sir Edmund Burton in Transformers: The Last Knight, which was released in June 2017.

On 31 October 2011, André Rieu released an album including a waltz which Hopkins had composed in 1964, at the age of 26. Hopkins had never heard his composition, "And the Waltz Goes On", before it was premiered by Rieu's orchestra in Vienna; Rieu's album was given the same name as Hopkins' piece.

In a 2012 interview, Hopkins stated, "I've been composing music all my life and if I'd been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college. As it was I had to settle for being an actor." In 1986, he released a single called "Distant Star", which peaked at No. 75 in the UK Singles Chart. In 2007, he announced he would retire temporarily from the screen to tour around the world. Hopkins has also written music for the concert hall, in collaboration with Stephen Barton as orchestrator. These compositions include The Masque of Time, given its world premiere with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in October 2008, and Schizoid Salsa.

In January 2012, Hopkins released an album of classical music, entitled Composer, performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and released on CD via the UK radio station Classic FM. The album consists of nine of his original works and film scores, with one of the pieces titled "Margam" in tribute to his home town near Port Talbot in Wales.

Hopkins has been married three times: to Petronella Barker from 1966 to 1972; to Jennifer Lynton from 1973 to 2002; and, since 2003, to Stella Arroyave. On Christmas Eve 2012, he celebrated his 10th wedding anniversary by having a blessing at a private service at St Davids Cathedral in St Davids, Pembrokeshire, in the most westerly point of Wales. He has a daughter, actress and singer Abigail Hopkins (born 20 August 1968), from his first marriage. The two are estranged; when asked if he had any grandchildren, he said, "I don't have any idea. People break up. Families split and, you know, 'Get on with your life.' People make choices. I don't care one way or the other."

In October 2015, Hopkins appeared as Sir in a BBC Two production of Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, alongside Ian McKellen, Edward Fox and Emily Watson. The Dresser is set in a London theatre during the Blitz, where an ageing actor-manager, Sir, prepares for his starring role in King Lear with the help of his devoted dresser, Norman. Hopkins described his role as Sir as "the highlight of my life. It was a chance to work with the actors I had run away from. To play another actor is fun because you know the ins and outs of their thinking – especially with someone like Sir, who is a diabolically insecure, egotistical man." He spoke again on the impact the role had on him in 2018, "When I was at the Royal National Theatre all those years ago, I knew I had something in me, but I didn’t have the discipline. I had a Welsh temperament and didn’t have that 'fitting in' mechanism. I would fight, I would rebel. I thought, 'Well, I don’t belong here.' And for almost 50 years afterwards, I felt that edge of, 'I don’t belong anywhere, I’m a loner.' But in The Dresser, when Ian [McKellen] responded, it was wonderful. We got on so well and I suddenly felt at home, as though that lack of belonging was all in my imagination, all in my vanity".

Beginning in October 2016, Hopkins starred as Robert Ford in the HBO sci-fi series Westworld where he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for his performance. Hopkins starred as Lear in the 2018 television film King Lear acting alongside Emma Thompson, Florence Pugh, and Jim Broadbent which was broadcast on BBC Two on 28 May 2018. Hopkins received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for his performance.

In a 2016 interview with the Radio Times, Hopkins spoke of his ability to frighten people since he was a boy growing up in Port Talbot, Wales. "I don't know why but I've always known what scares people. When I was a kid I'd tell the girls around the street the story about Dracula and I'd go 'th-th-th' (the sucking noise which he reproduced in The Silence of the Lambs). As a result, they'd run away screaming." He recalled going through the script of Silence of the Lambs for the first time with fellow cast members. "I didn't know what they were going to make of it but I'd prepared it—my first line to Jodie Foster was: 'Good morning. You're one of Jack Crawford's aren't you?' Everyone froze. There was a silence. Then one of the producers said, 'Holy crap, don't change a thing'." On Hopkins' approach to playing villains, Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian writes, "When he portrays deliberately scary people, he plays them quietly, emphasising their sinister control."

In 2019, Hopkins portrayed Pope Benedict XVI opposite Jonathan Pryce as Pope Francis in Fernando Meirelles' The Two Popes. He stated, "The great treasure was working with – apart from [director] Meirelles – Pryce. We’re both from Wales. He’s from the north, and I’m from the south". The film is set in the Vatican City in the aftermath of the Vatican leaks scandal and follows Pope Benedict XVI as he attempts to convince Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to reconsider his decision to resign as an archbishop as he confides his own intentions to abdicate the papacy. In August 2019, the film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival to critical acclaim. The film started streaming on December 20, 2019, by Netflix. The performances of Pryce and Hopkins, as well as McCarten's screenplay, received high praise from critics, and all three men received nominations for their work at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes and British Academy Film Awards.

In 2020, Hopkins played a man struggling with his memory in The Father. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it received critical acclaim, with many praising Hopkins' performance with many critics calling him a standout and Oscar frontrunner. The film also stars Olivia Colman as his daughter. The film is based on a Tony Award nominated play Le Père by Florian Zeller. Frank Langella who originated the role on the Broadway stage received a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performance. The film is set to be released on 18 December 2020 by Sony Pictures Classics. In a Q&A at the Telluride Film Festival Hopkins praised both Colman and Zeller saying comparing the working experience saying it "might've been the highlight of my life". Hopkins mentioned how lucky he's been over the past 5 years working with Ian McKellen in The Dresser, Emma Thompson in King Lear, and Jonathan Pryce in The Two Popes.

Hopkins is a recovering alcoholic; he has stayed sober since he stopped drinking just after Christmas 1975. He said that 35 years ago, "I made that quantum leap when I asked for help. I just found something and a woman talked to me and she said, just trust in God. And I said, well, why not?" When asked, "did you literally pray?" Hopkins responded: "No, I didn't. I think because I asked for help, which is a form of prayer." In an interview in January 2020, when asked if he was still agnostic, Hopkins responded, "Agnosticism is a bit strange. An agnostic doubts and atheism denies. I’m not a holy Joe; I’m just an old sinner like everyone else. I do believe more than ever now that there is a vast area of our own lives that we know nothing about. As I get older, I can cry at the drop of a hat because the wonderful, terrible passion of life is so short. I have to believe there’s something bigger than me. I’m just a microbe. That, for me, is the biggest feeling of relief – acknowledging that I am really nothing. I’m compelled to say, whoever’s running the show, thank you very much."