Anthony Hopkins

Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins CBE (IPA: ['æntəni 'hɒpkɪnz]) (born 31 December 1937) is an Academy Award, Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning Welsh film, stage and television actor.

Background

Hopkins was born in Margam, Port Talbot in Wales. His parents are Muriel Hopkins (née Yeats) and the late Richard Arthur Hopkins. His mother is a distant relative of the Irish 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 Jones' West Monmouth Boys' 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 compatriot 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."^[1]

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, along with future James Bond star Timothy Dalton, who played his estranged lover, Philip II of France.

Although Hopkins continued in theatre (most notably in the Broadway production of Peter Shaffer's Equus, directed by John Dexter) 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 organization 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 1967), from his first marriage, who is an actress and singer.

Hopkins now resides in the United States. He had moved there once before during the 1970s to pursue his film career, but returned to Britain in the late 1980s, believing that he'd achieved all he could in Hollywood. However, he decided to go back to the USA following his 1990s success. He became a naturalized citizen on April 12, 2000.

He celebrated this with a 3,000-mile road trip across the country. As a dual national, despite some initial controversy, he retains his knighthood and uses the title 'Sir' in the UK.^[2] He has never used it in the U.S. and, in taking the oath to become an American citizen, Hopkins pledged to "renounce the title of nobility to which I have heretofore belonged." Hopkins has also stated that he only accepted the knighthood to make his wife happy.^[3] Some disappointment and outrage ensued in his native land of Wales over his American citizenship. In common with other British theatrical knights, the title is omitted for professional credits.

Despite his departure from Wales, he is an outspoken proponent of Welsh nationalism.^{[citation needed]}

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. While it can allow for some careful improvisation, 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.

Richard Attenborough, who has directed Hopkins on five occasions, found himself going to great lengths during the filming of Shadowlands (1993) to accommodate the differing approaches of his two stars (Hopkins and Debra Winger), who shared many scenes. Whereas Hopkins liked to keep rehearsals to an absolute minimum, preferring the spontaneity of a 'fresh' take, Winger was the antithesis: she rehearsed continuously, but seemingly not to the detriment of her performance. To allow for this, Attenborough stood in for Hopkins during Winger's rehearsals, only bringing him in for the last one before a take.

The director praised Hopkins:

"Tony has this extraordinary ability to make you believe when you hear him that it is the very first time he has ever said that line. It's an incredible gift."^[1]

In addition, Hopkins is a gifted 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 chat show Parkinson featured an entertaining impersonation of comedian Tommy Cooper.

Hannibal Lecter

Hopkins' 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, Best Director 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 17 minutes. Hannibal Lecter, as portrayed by Hopkins, has been labeled by the American Film Institute as the number one film villain of all time.^{[citation needed]}

Director Jonathan Demme offered Hopkins the role of Lecter in 1989 after it had been turned down by Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro, and Gene Hackman. At the time, the actor was making a return to the London stage, performing in M. Butterfly. He had come back to Britain after living for a number of years in Hollywood, apparently deeming his attempts to further his career there to be a failure:

"Well that part of my life's over; it's a chapter closed. I suppose I'll just have to settle for being a respectable actor poncing around the West End and doing respectable BBC work for the rest of my life."^[1]

Hopkins was amazed and delighted to discover that Demme had thought of him for The Silence of the Lambs after remembering his performance as Dr Frederick Treves in The Elephant Man (1980). The director believed that the "intense humanity and intense intelligence" that Hopkins had brought to the character of Treves would be perfect for Lecter; although Hopkins, even to this day, fails to see the relationship that Demme saw between the two.

Hopkins reprised the role twice, in Hannibal (2000) and Red Dragon (2002). 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. However, Hopkins stated that Red Dragon would feature his last performance as the character, and that he would not reprise even a narrative role in the latest addition to the series, Hannibal Rising.

Hopkins' performance served largely as a 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), Zorro (The Mask of Zorro, 1998) and more recently Burt Munro (The World's Fastest Indian, 2005).

He won Emmy Awards for his roles in The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case and The Bunker.

In 1996 he directed his first film, August, an adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

His second directorial effort, an experimental drama called Slipstream, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007.

In 1986 he released a single called "Distant Star". It peaked at #75 in the UK charts.

Selected filmography

Trivia

• Hopkins was playing King Lear on stage at the National Theatre while Brian Cox was playing Hannibal Lecktor [sic] in Manhunter. Years later, during production of The Silence of the Lambs, the roles were reversed.
• He has received two Oscar nominations for playing U.S. Presidents. He played Richard Nixon in Nixon, and John Quincy Adams in Amistad.
• The drama school at the Southern Institute of Technology in New Zealand was named after him when he was in Invercargill filming The World's Fastest Indian.
• Lecter's slurping sound from The Silence of the Lambs was apparently improvised. However, Hopkins admits it may have been influenced by Bela Lugosi (with no remembrance from which movie).
• Hopkins' height is 5' 8½".
• Hopkins met and was photograped with America's tenor Daniel Rodriguez at Disney Mouseplanet birthday party in July 2003.
• Hopkins once landed a leading role in a film based on the book The Girl from Petrovka by George Feifer. A few days after signing the contract, Hopkins travelled to London to buy a copy of the book. He tried several bookshops but was unsuccessful. Waiting at Leicester Square underground station for his train home, he noticed a book apparently discarded on a bench. Incredibly, it was The Girl from Petrovka, with notes scribbled in the margins. Two years later, in the middle of filming in Vienna, Hopkins was visited by George Feifer, the author. Feifer mentioned that he did not have a copy of his own book. He had lent the last one — containing his own annotations — to a friend who had lost it somewhere in London. With mounting astonishment, Hopkins handed Feifer the book he had found. "Is this the one?" he asked, "with the notes scribbled in the margins?" It was the same book.^[1]

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d} Falk, Quentin (2004). Anthony Hopkins: The Biography, 4th, Virgin Books. ISBN 0-7535-0999-7. 
2. ^ Hopkins renounces knighthood. IMDb. Retrieved on 2006-08-13.
3. ^ A Knight or not?. IMDb. Retrieved on 2006-08-13.

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