Philip Anthony Hopkins was born on New Year's Eve, 1937, at 77, Wern Road, Margam, near Port Talbot, South Wales. His mother was Muriel (nee Phillips, a relative of the poet William Butler Yeats) and his father Richard Arthur, a man of immense, sometimes violent energy, whose eyes would change colour when he was excited and who, Hopkins believes, eventually died from being wound too tight. Richard's father was a self-educated man who, having trained at a bakery in Piccadilly, built a bakery business after his own father had drunk away what fortune the family had. Strong-willed and free-thinking, he was a vegetarian and a militant trades unionist. He was also very close to young Anthony, nicknaming him George (oddly, father Richard would know him as Charlie).
Richard continued the family bakery, eventually moving Muriel and only child Anthony into Port Talbot to live above the shop. Young Anthony was a sensitive kid, happier drawing, painting and playing the piano (he's now a virtuoso) than hanging with the other kids. A dyslexic, he was poor academically, once saying of himself "I was lousy in school. Real screwed-up. A moron. I was anti-social and didn't bother with the other kids. A really bad student. I didn't have any brains. I didn't know what I was doing there. That's why I became an actor". To separate him from the many other Hopkins at school, he became known as Mad Hopkins.
Failing badly at Port Talbot's Central School, in 1949 his parents sent him to West Monmouth boarding school in Pontypool, hoping he'd learn some discipline and begin to fit in. After five wretched terms, they brought him out again, placing him at Cowbridge Grammar, a lot closer to home. Here he'd spend another unhappy four years, leaving with a solitary O-level, in English.
Hopkins' problem was that, though extremely bright, his interests lay far outside school. Aside from art and music, he was also taken by acting. His bedroom was lit up at night by the red flash of the cinema opposite and, in the holidays, he'd watch at least two movies a week, thrilling to the performances of Bogart and Cagney, and the B-movie likes of Jack Palance (no surprise, then, that he later became such a competent villain). There was also the matter of Port Talbot's local hero. By the early Fifties, Richard Burton was a Hollywood star who caused a major stir whenever he returned to Wales. As Burton's sister lived nearby, the young Hopkins found out about Burton's next visit home and went over to get his autograph, being mightily impressed by Burton's natty sports car. Burton, he thought, had escaped this small town and found fame and fortune - why couldn't he?
Following in Burton's footsteps, and having been further inspired by seeing Emlyn Williams touring as Dylan Thomas (he'd later direct a movie about Thomas), he began his apprenticeship with the local YMCA players, then enrolled at Cardiff's College of Music and Drama. After graduation, he took a job with the Arts Council then, in 1958, came National Service. Joining the Royal Artillery as 23449720 Gunner Hopkins, he was posted to Oswestry, then Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain, spending two years "typewriter-punching" for thirty bob a week. Leaving as a Bombardier, he went back to his parents' new place in Laleston, near Bridgend and, getting back into drama, appeared in several local plays, making his professional debut in Have A Cigarette, at the Palace Theatre, Swansea, in 1960.
Hopkins' inherited characteristics made him intense, and his years as a lonely outsider fuelled the fire. He won a place at RADA, from which he graduated in 1963. He spent a while in rep then, in 1965, was invited to join Laurence Olivier's National Theatre. At his audition, he cheekily chose to read from Othello, which Olivier had performed onscreen that year. But that was Hopkins at 27 - arrogant, angry and prodigiously talented.
In 1966, he made his screen debut in The White Bus, directed by Lindsay "If" Anderson. It was intended to be the first part of a colour-inspired trilogy (to be followed by Red and Blue - Kieslowski would later find fame for just such a 3-parter), but that was not to be. No matter, it was on the stage that Hopkins was to make his name. With the National Theatre, he played in The Flea In Her Ear, Juno And The Peacock, as Boris in The Provincial Life, and Andrei in Chekov's Three Sisters.
1967 was a big turning-point. Acting as Olivier's understudy in Strindberg's Dance Of Death, he took over the lead when the great man fell ill with appendicitis. And he was stupendously good, Olivier himself recalling that this "new young actor... of exceptional promise%u2026 walked away with the part of Edgar like a cat with a mouse between his teeth". Next would come another showstopping performance, in a blonde wig and flapper dress, as Audrey in an all-male adaptation of As You Like It. And he filmed his big screen debut proper, The Lion In Winter, where he played the young Richard the Lionheart, one of three sons of Peter O'Toole's Henry II who are competing for their father's throne. Both fierce and tender, Hopkins was superb, easily matching the grand likes of O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn, and being nominated for a BAFTA.
'67 also saw trouble begin. Hopkins would marry the actress Petronella Barker and have a daughter, Abigail, but the relationship would sour quickly. He was now drinking heavily as he toured up and down the country. Split from Barker and feeling that he'd abandoned his child (he'd not have contact with Abigail for many years though, after reconciliation, she'd appear in several of his movies), his behaviour grew worse. All the attention, too, was not easy for this perennial loner to bear. And he despised the circle who hung around the National Theatre. "I detested all of them," he later said, "Ken Tynan and all those ghastly people, sitting around smoking their cigarettes between their middle fingers".
Though already familiar to some sharp-eyed American viewers after his film performance as Lloyd George in Young Winston (1971), Hopkins burst full-flower onto the American scene in 1974 as an ex-Nazi doctor in QB VII, the first television miniseries. Also in 1974, Hopkins made his Broadway debut in +Equus, eventually directing the 1977 Los Angeles production. The actor became typed in intense, neurotic roles for the next several years: in films he portrayed the obsessed father of a girl whose soul has been transferred into the body of another child in Audrey Rose (1976), an off-the-wall ventriloquist in Magic (1978), and the much-maligned Captain Bligh (opposite Mel Gibson's Fletcher Christian) in Bounty (1982). On TV, Hopkins played roles as varied (yet somehow intertwined) as Adolph Hitler, accused Lindbergh-baby kidnapper Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
In 1991, Hopkins won an Academy Award for his bloodcurdling portrayal of murderer Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. With the aplomb of a thorough professional, Anthony Hopkins was able to follow-up his chilling Lecter with characters of great kindness, courtesy, and humanity: the conscience-stricken butler of a British fascist in The Remains of the Day (1992) and compassionate author C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands (1993). In 1995, Hopkins earned mixed acclaim and an Oscar nomination for his impressionistic take (done without elaborate makeup) on President Richard M. Nixon in Oliver Stone's Nixon. After his performance as Pablo Picasso in James Ivory's Surviving Picasso (1996), Hopkins garnered another Oscar nomination -- this time for Best Supporting Actor -- the following year for his work in Steven Spielberg's slavery epic Amistad. Following this honor, Hopkins chose roles that cast him as a father figure, first in the ploddingly long Meet Joe Black and then in the have-mask-will-travel swashbuckler Mask of Zorro with Antonio Banderas and fellow countrywoman Catherine Zeta-Jones. In his next film, 1999's Instinct, Hopkins again played a father, albeit one of a decidedly different stripe. As anthropologist Ethan Powell, Hopkins takes his field work with gorillas a little too seriously, reverting back to his animal instincts, killing a couple of people, and alienating his daughter (Maura Tierney) in the process.
Hopkins kept a low profile in 2000, providing narration for Ron Howard's live-action adaptation of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas and voicing the commands overheard by Tom Cruise's special agent in John Woo's Mission: Impossible 2. In 2001, Hopkins returned to the screen to reprise his role as the effete, erudite, eponymous cannibal in Ridley Scott's Hannibal, the long-anticipated sequel to Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991). The 160-million-dollar blockbuster did much for Hopkins' bank account but little for his standing with the critics, who by and large found Hannibal to be a stylish, gory exercise in illogical tedium. Worse yet, some wags suggested that the actor would have been better off had he followed his Silence co-star Jodie Foster's lead and opted out of the sequel altogether. Later that year, the moody, cloying Stephen King adaptation Hearts in Atlantis did little to repair his reputation with critics or audiences, who avoided the film like the plague.
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