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, Port Talbot, West Glamorgan, Wales, United Kingdom
in
The Elephant Man (film)
Hannibal Lecter in
The Silence of the Lambs (film)
Stevens in
The Remains of the Day (film)
Richard Nixon in
Nixon (film)
John Quincy Adams ' in
Amistad (film)
for The Silence of the Lambs (film) (1991)
() (born December 31, 1937) is an Academy Awards and Emmy Award-winning Wales-born film, theater and television actor.
Background
Hopkins was born 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 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 Royal 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, 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 theatre production of Peter Shaffer's Equus (play) ) 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 Order of the British Empire (Order of the British Empire) 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 philanthropy 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 for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty 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 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 naturalization 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 British honours system and uses the title 'Sir' in the UK. 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. 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.
Hopkins is an acknowledged former alcoholism 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."
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 (film) in its 1991 restoration. His interview on the 1998 relaunch edition of the British TV chat show Parkinson (TV series) featured an entertaining impersonation of comedian Tommy Cooper.
Hannibal Lecter
His most famous role is the cannibalism 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 Academy Award for Best Actress. In addition, the film won Academy Award for Best Picture, Academy Award for Best Director and Academy Award for Writing 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.
Hopkins was offered the part out of the blue in 1989 by director Jonathan Demme. 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."
Hopkins was amazed 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 (film) (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.
He reprised the role twice, in Hannibal (film) and Red Dragon (film) . The character first appeared in the film Manhunter (film) , 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 Dutton 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), Sir Frederick Treves, 1st Baronet (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).
He won Emmy Awards for his roles in The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case and The Bunker .
Selected filmography
{ (1968) The Looking Glass War (1969) Hamlet (1969 film) (1969) The Great Inimitable Mr. Dickens (1970) The Three Sisters (1970) Hearts and Flowers (1970, TV – Play for Today) Young Winston (1972) War and Peace (1972) A Doll's House (film) (1973) The Girl from Petrovka (1974) QB VII (1974) Juggernaut (film) (1974) The Childhood Friend (1974, TV – Play for Today) Dark Victory (1976) The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case (1976) Victory at Entebbe (1976) A Bridge Too Far (1977) Audrey Rose (1977) Magic (film) (1978) International Velvet (1978) Mayflower: The Pilgrims' Adventure (1979) The Elephant Man (film) (1980) A Change of Seasons (1980) The Bunker#Movie (1981, TV) Peter and Paul (1981) Othello (1981, TV) The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1982 film) (1982, TV) A Married Man (1983, TV) The Bounty (1984) Hollywood Wives (1985, TV) Arch of Triumph (tele-movie) (1985, TV) Guilty Conscience (film) (1985) Mussolini and I (1985, TV) The Good Father (1985) 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) Desperate Hours (1990) The Silence of the Lambs (1991) Howards End (film) (1991)
(1992) Chaplin (film 1992) (1992) The Efficiency Expert (1992) Spotswood (film) (1992) Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) The Trial (1993) The Remains of the Day (film) (1993) Shadowlands (1993) Legends of the Fall (1994) The Road to Wellville (1995) August (1995) (also directed, composed score) Nixon (movie) (1995) Surviving Picasso (1996) Amistad (1997 movie) (1997) The Edge (1997 film) (1997) The Mask of Zorro (1998) Meet Joe Black (1998) Instinct (film) (1999) Titus (film) (1999) Mission: Impossible II (2000) How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) (voice only) The Devil and Daniel Webster (2001) Hannibal (film) (2001) Hearts in Atlantis (film) (2001) Red Dragon (film) (2002) Bad Company (2002 film) (2002) The Human Stain (2003) Alexander (film) (2004) Proof (2005 film) (2005) The World's Fastest Indian (2005) All the King's Men (2006 film) (2006) Bobby (2006 film) (2006, filming) Fracture (2006, filming) Beowulf (2007 film) (2007, post-production)) Papa (2007, pre-production) Ray Gun (film) (2007) Harry and the Butler (2006, announced) Slipstream (2007, announced)
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 was offered the role of Alfred the butler in Batman Begins'', but turned it down.
Courtesy of: http://www.wikipedia.org/
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