Hopkins, Anthony

(1937– )

   Born in Port Talbot, South Wales, on December 31, 1937, the son of Muriel Annie (Yeats) and Richard Arthur Hopkins, Anthony Hopkins attended Cowbridge Grammar School, Glamorgan, before going on for his stage training at Cardiff College of Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (1961–1963). He began his stage career at the Manchester Liberty Theatre in 1960 appearing in Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow. After repertory work in Leicester and Liverpool, Hopkins first appeared on the London stage at the Royal Court Theatre in November of 1964. He then built his stage credentials with the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic in London for seven years, and in 1974 he took over the role of Dr. Martin Dysar t from Richard Burton for the American production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus. Hopkins returned to the National Theatre to play Lambert le Roux in Howard Brenton and David Hare’s Pravda, which won him Britain’s prestigious Laurence Olivier Award in 1985. Hopkins made his film debut in 1968 in The Lion in Winter, followed in 1969 by his role as Claudius in the Tony Richardson film production of Hamlet. Several films followed, directed by Richard Attenborough—Young Winston (1972), A Bridge Too Far (1977) and Magic (1978). In 1980 Hopkins played Dr. Frederick Treves in The Elephant Man, directed by David Lynch, but his breakthrough movie-star role was that of Dr. Hannibal Lecter for Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. That same year, STANLEY KUBRICK asked him to do the redubbing of Laurence Olivier’s lines for the restored version of Spartacus, in the role of Crassus. The most remarkable scene of the restoration was that in which Olivier’s Crassus revealed “his polymorphous sexual-Hopkins,Anthony n 167 ity to Tony Curtis’s slave boy, Antoninus,” in what critic Stephen Hunter called “clearly recognizable tones. ”

   References

   ■ Hunter, Stephen, “‘Spartacus’ brings grandeur, romance back to the movies,” Baltimore Sun, Maryland Live, May 3, 1991, 15.

   J. M. W.