Philip Anthony Hopkins, born on New Year's Eve, 1937, in Port Talbot, Wales, paid his dues as a stage actor for many years in England before breaking through to movie stardom. Thinking that he might become rich and famous like fellow Welsh actor Richard Burton, who had also grown up in Port Talbot, he completed his course of study at the Cardiff College of Music and Drama and then graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1963.
Within two years, SIR LAURENCE OLIVIER invited him to join the Royal National Theatre in London, and within five years he landed his first film role in The Lion in Winter (1968). Anthony Hopkins left the National Theatre in 1973, married Jennifer Lynton, a film production assistant, and moved first to New York and then to California. There he found roles in A Bridge Too Far (1977), Magic (1978) (in which he played a ventriloquist controlled by his evil dummy), and, most impressively, The Elephant Man (1980), directed by David Lynch.
After 10 years in America, Anthony Hopkins returned to the London stage in 1984, where he won rave notices in 1985 playing Lambert le Roux, the Rupert Murdoch–like publishing tycoon in the play Pravda, by David Hare and Howard Brenton. The play was such a hit that it was revived in 1986 with Anthony Hopkins still in the lead. But an even more demanding role awaited him in Hollywood, a role that would make him an unforgettable superstar.
Anthony Hopkins took the role of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs in 1992 and made it so thoroughly his own that most people forgot that it had been played differently by Brian Cox in Manhunter (1986). So astonishing was this creation that Anthony Hopkins earned an Academy Award as Best Actor. He would go on, of course, to play Lecter in the unpleasant sequel, Hannibal (2001). When a novelist once complained to David Hare that "Tony seems to have no way of controlling his emotions," Hare responded, "He does have a way. It's called acting."
Nobody has done it better in a wide variety of roles - a sinister Claudius for Tony Richardson's Hamlet (1969), an overly uptight butler in Remains of the Day (1993), for which he received the British Academy Award as Best Actor, an anguished president coming apart at the seams in Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995), a campy and flamboyant Van Helsing in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), a gentle bookseller in 84 Charing Cross Road (1986), a disturbed artist in Surviving Picasso (1996), a murderously jealous husband in The Edge (1997), a murderously angry avenging father in Titus (1999), an inquisitive publisher in Chaplin (1992), and a compassionate writer in Shadowlands (1993).
Truly, no role, however serious or silly, seemed beyond his reach. He was knighted in 1993. Sir Anthony was in top form as Lecter in 2002 in the Silence of the Lambs prequel, Red Dragon.
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