Anthony Hopkins

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hopkins at the Toronto International Film Festival (2010)

Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins , CBE (born December 31, 1937 in Margam , Neath Port Talbot , Wales ) is a British actor and Oscar winner. He became known worldwide for his portrayal of the fictional character Hannibal Lecter by Thomas Harris .

Life

Childhood and youth

Anthony Hopkins grew up with his mother Muriel and father Richard Arthur in a small apartment above the family's own bakery. By his own admission, he was a loner. As a dyslexic , he had a tough time studying at Port Talbot Central School and was not very popular. At the age of twelve, his parents sent him to West Monmouth Boarding School in Pontypool . For the last four years of school he moved to Cowbridge Grammar School.

Anthony Hopkins took an early interest in cinema and was enthusiastic about actors like Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney . His particular role model was Richard Burton , who had lived just a few blocks from Hopkins.

After graduating from school, he kept himself afloat with small jobs until he was drafted into the Royal Artillery in 1958 , where he served as a gunner. After that, Hopkins moved back to his parents, who now lived in Laleston, near Bridgend . He continued to occupy himself with the theater and played in several plays. In 1960 he made his first paid appearance in Have A Cigarette at the Palace Theater and received one of the coveted places at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where he graduated in 1963.

Acting career

In 1965, Hopkins was engaged by Laurence Olivier at the Royal National Theater . For the audition, he chose a passage from Othello , the role Olivier had been playing in theaters for about a year. In 1966 he starred in the film The White Bus by director Lindsay Anderson , at the National Theater he made a name for himself as a stage actor in the plays The Flea In Her Ear , Juno And The Paycock , The Provincial Life and Three Sisters . When Laurence Olivier fell ill during the season of Dance Of Death in 1967 , Hopkins stood in for him. As a result, Hopkins was in an original version of Shakespeare's As You Like It with exclusively male actors as "Audrey" on the stage. He also played the young Richard the Lionheart in The Lion in Winter . The film won three Academy Awards (Best Screenplay, Best Music and Katharine Hepburn for Best Actress). Hopkins was nominated for the British Film Awards for his role .

From 1967 onwards, Hopkins suffered from alcohol problems, and the increasing public attention troubled the loner. He was increasingly in front of the camera and played, among other things, in John le Carré's agent thriller War in the Mirror and Claudius in Shakespeare's Hamlet with Nicol Williamson . In 1971 Hopkins received his first leading role in an action film : In The Killer Ship, based on the novel by Alistair MacLean , he played the secret agent Philip Calvert, who competes against pirates on the Scottish coast. Shortly thereafter, Hopkins was discovered by Richard Attenborough , who called him "the best actor of his generation" and cast him for five of his films. In 1973, Hopkins won the Society of Film and Television Arts' British Academy Television Award for his role in the television miniseries War and Peace . During this time, his drinking problems increased. However, after waking somewhere on December 29, 1975 with no idea where he was or how he got there, he gave up drinking.

In 1974 he played a KGB agent on the side of Goldie Hawn in The Girl from Petrova , who is supposed to prevent the love affair between a ballerina and a US journalist. He won his first Emmy in 1976 for his portrayal as Bruno Richard Hauptmann in The Abduction of the Lindbergh Baby . He played the role of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in the Entebbe hostage drama , and Lieutenant Colonel John Frost in The Arnhem Bridge . For the 1978 horror film Magic - A Scary Love Story , he was nominated again for the BAFTA and a Golden Globe Award . Also in 1978, Hopkins played the trainer of the British Olympic Equestrian Team Captain Johnson in the film All the Happiness on Earth . The film is a freely designed sequel to the film Little Girl, Big Heart with Liz Taylor.

Anthony Hopkins with Isabella Rossellini on the set of John Schlesinger's ... Heaven Stands Still (1993)

In the early 1980s such successful films as The Elephant Man by director David Lynch and The Bunker were made . Hopkins received an Emmy for his portrayal of Adolf Hitler in the war drama . He also successfully played the title roles in Othello and The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lesley-Anne Down as Esmeralda. In 1984 he played alongside Mel Gibson, Captain William Bligh in The Bounty . Hopkins returned to England in the mid-1980s. There he played in 1988 alongside Anne Bancroft and Judi Dench the bookseller Frank Doel in the film drama Between the Lines and in Graham Greene's The 10th Man .

It wasn't until 1990 that Hopkins turned back to Hollywood. In 1991, he played the role of Abel Magwitch in the Walt Disney television production Great Expectations for Charles Dickens . In the same year, Hopkins received the offer of his life: the director Jonathan Demme was looking for an actor to play the role of a psychopath after Gene Hackman , Robert Duvall , Brian Cox and Jeremy Irons had already turned them down. So he cast Hopkins for the role with which one would henceforth always be associated: that of Dr. Hannibal Lecter . In The Silence of the Lambs , Hopkins supports FBI agent Clarice Starling ( Jodie Foster ) as a psychopath in her hunt for a serial killer. For this role, Hopkins, who could only be seen for just over 16 minutes in the entire film, received the Oscar. The great success of the film finally made Hopkins a star and established him as one of the world's leading character actors. Hopkins also played the role of Hannibal Lecter in the sequel Hannibal and in the prequel Red Dragon . In the film Hannibal Rising - How it all began , he is replaced by Gaspard Ulliel , as the youth of Hannibal is described there.

In a short time, other successful films were made, including The Trial based on the novel by Franz Kafka , Bram Stoker's Dracula directed by Francis Ford Coppola and Reunion in Howards End based on E. M. Forster . In John Schlesinger's And Heaven Stands Still , based on the novel Innocents by Ian McEwan , he played an American secret agent in the Russian-occupied part of Berlin who falls in love with the wrong woman. In the eight Academy Award-nominated drama What Left of the Day was one of the nominations for Hopkins' portrayal of the self-sacrificing butler Stevens. The 1993 film Shadowlands , in which he played alongside Debra Winger - again under the direction of Richard Attenborough - the author of the Narnia Chronicles C. S. Lewis , had Lewis' relationship with the American writer Joy Davidman on the subject. Hopkins received a BAFTA Award for this. In Legends of Passion , he took on the role of a Montana rancher in the period before and during World War I , whose sons ( Brad Pitt and Aidan Quinn ) fall in love with the same woman.

He received another Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the American President for Oliver Stone's Nixon film . Hopkins filmed Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya under the title August , in which he also played the lead role. He moved the action to North Wales in 1896. For his appearance in Steven Spielberg's Amistad - The Slave Ship as President John Quincy Adams , he was nominated again for an Oscar. After the hit movie The Mask of Zorro , in which Hopkins as the older Zorro instructed his successor ( Antonio Banderas ), he played a doomed large businessman in a rendezvous with Joe Black . In 2007 he starred alongside Ryan Gosling in Gregory Hoblit's thriller The Perfect Crime . In 2013 he embodied the director Alfred Hitchcock in the biopic Hitchcock ( Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho ).

composer

  • For his film August 1996, Hopkins also composed the musically classic soundtrack .
  • On July 2, 2011, the waltz And the Waltz goes on , which Hopkins had composed 47 years earlier, was premiered by André Rieu with the Johann Strauss Orchestra in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. Hopkins and his wife were present.

Private life

Hopkins was married to Petronella Barker from 1967 to 1972, with whom he has a daughter, the 1968 born actress and musician Abigail Hopkins . He married Jennifer Lynton on January 13, 1973 and divorced on April 30, 2002. He has been married to Stella Arroyave since March 1, 2003.

German voice actors

In the past few decades, Hopkins' dubbing voices changed frequently. In the 1990s, Rolf Schult mainly gave him his voice - among others in Das Schweigen der Lämmer . Joachim Kerzel has been his standard German voice since the beginning of 2000 .

Filmography (selection)

As an actor
As a director

Awards (selection)

Anthony Hopkins (1996)

Oscar

  • Award
1992: Best Actor for The Silence of the Lambs
  • Nominations
1994: Best Actor for What Was Left Of The Day
1996: Best Actor for Nixon
1998: Best Supporting Actor for Amistad
2020: Best Supporting Actor for The Two Popes

Golden Globe Award

  • Award
2006: Cecil B. DeMille Award (= Golden Globe Award for life's work)
  • Nominations
1979: Best Actor in a Drama for Magic - An Eerie Love Story
1992: Best Actor in a Drama for The Silence of the Lambs
1994: Best Actor in a Drama for What Was Left Of The Day
1996: Best Actor in a Drama for Nixon
1998: Best Supporting Actor for Amistad
2020: Best Supporting Actor for The Two Popes

Emmy

  • Awards
1976: Outstanding Lead Actor for The Abduction of the Lindbergh Baby
1981: Outstanding Lead Actor for Der Bunker

BAFTA

  • Awards
1992: Best Actor for The Silence of the Lambs
1993: Best leading actor for What was left of the day
2008: Honorary Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts
  • Nominations
1969: Best Supporting Actor for The Lion in Winter
1979: Best Actor for Magic - An Eerie Love Story
1994: Best Actor for Shadowlands

Further awards

Web links

Commons : Anthony Hopkins  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ André Rieu premieres Anthony Hopkins waltz
personal data
SURNAME Hopkins, Anthony
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hopkins, Philip Anthony (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-American actor
DATE OF BIRTH December 31, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Margam , Port Talbot , Wales