Anthony Hopkins

Anthony Hopkins, born in 1937, British stage and motion-picture actor, admired for his ability to play a wide range of characters. Hopkins has played reserved British characters and American presidents but also menacing figures such as the homicidal Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Hopkins was born in Port Talbot, South Wales, and educated at Cardiff College of Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s he appeared frequently at the National Theatre in London, receiving critical acclaim for his performances in the plays of William Shakespeare. Hopkins was heavily influenced during these years by his mentor, British actor Laurence Olivier.

Hopkins made his screen debut in The White Bus (1967) and played Richard the Lion-Hearted in his first major film, The Lion in Winter (1968). Hopkins's notable film work during this period included A Doll's House (1973); Juggernaut (1975); The Elephant Man (1980); as Commander William Bligh in The Bounty (1984); and roles in The Good Father (1987) and 84 Charing Cross Road (1987).

In 1991 Hopkins’s career received a boost with his role in The Silence of the Lambs, directed by Jonathan Demme. Hopkins's brilliant performance as a calculating serial killer won him legions of fans and an Academy Award for best actor (while the film won the Oscar for best picture). He played Lecter again in Hannibal (2001, directed by Ridley Scott) and Red Dragon (2002).

Since The Silence of the Lambs Hopkins has given critically acclaimed film performances in Howards End (1992), The Remains of the Day (Academy Award nomination, 1993), and Shadowlands (1993). Three roles followed in which he portrayed characters based on real-life figures: as health fanatic John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville (1995), as the disgraced American president in Nixon (directed by Oliver Stone, 1995), and as the great Spanish painter in Surviving Picasso (1996).

In 1998 Hopkins was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as ex-president John Quincy Adams in the Steven Spielberg film Amistad (1997). The same year he appeared in Meet Joe Black and The Mask of Zorro. Hopkins played the lead in Titus (1999), a film version of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1594); Coleman Silk in The Human Stain (2003), adapted from the novel by Philip Roth; Ptolemy I in Alexander (2004), the biopic of Alexander the Great by Oliver Stone; a genius mathematician in a state of mental deterioration in Proof (2005); and 1967 motorcycle land-speed world record-holder Burt Munro in The World's Fastest Indian (2005). In 2006 he appeared as Judge Irwin in a new film version of the Robert Penn Warren novel All the King's Men (1946) and as a veteran employee of the Ambassador Hotel, scene of the assassination in 1968 of Robert F. Kennedy, in Emilio Estevez's Bobby.

Hopkins has continued to work in the theater throughout his career. Some of his notable stage roles include Coriolanus (1971), Macbeth (1972), Equus (1974), The Tempest (1979), King Lear (1986), and M. Butterfly (1989). He was knighted in 1993. In 1995 Hopkins directed his first film, August, a loosely based version of Russian play Uncle Vanya (1899) set in Wales.