Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins, known as Anthony Hopkins (born Port Talbot, Wales, 1937), is a British-American actor and one of the most recognisable and prolific performers in British cinema and theatre. A career spanning more than half a century, moving between stage and screen, has brought him two Academy Awards, several BAFTA Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards and a Laurence Olivier Award. Alongside acting, he has also composed music, directed and produced, though his name is above all associated with performance.
He was born in the Margam district of Port Talbot, the son of Muriel Anne and Richard Arthur Hopkins. School was unproductive for him. Solitary and dyslexic, he was drawn more to painting, drawing and the piano than to his studies. In 1949 his parents sent him to Jones' West Monmouth Boys' School in Pontypool, and he later attended Cowbridge Grammar School. The Welsh actor Richard Burton, whom he had met briefly at fifteen, encouraged him to pursue acting. He graduated in 1957 from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff and, after two years of national service, moved to London to train at RADA.
Laurence Olivier spotted him and in 1965 invited him to join the Royal National Theatre. There he worked as Olivier's understudy and stepped into his role in 1967, when Olivier was struck by appendicitis during a production of Strindberg's The Dance of Death. His breakthrough on screen came in 1968 with The Lion in Winter, in which he played Richard the Lionheart. Films of the 1970s and 1980s followed, among them A Bridge Too Far, The Elephant Man and Magic. On stage, his first leading roles were Coriolanus and Macbeth, and his Broadway debut in Equus, in 1975, earned him several awards.
Hopkins builds characters of elaborate psychological depth, which makes even his most unsettling figures believable. His career took off with Dr Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), the role that won him his first Oscar. Although he appears on screen for only about seventeen minutes, it remains the shortest leading performance to win an Academy Award. He returned to the character in Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002). Later nominations included The Remains of the Day, Amistad, Nixon and The Two Popes, and critics also praised his work in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Howards End, Shadowlands and Legends of the Fall. Yet he cannot be reduced to one type of role, since he has alternated film with theatre throughout his career.
In 2020 he starred in The Father, a drama about an elderly man facing a gradual loss of memory. For this role he won a second Oscar in 2022, at the age of 84, becoming the oldest actor to win the best actor award. His legacy lies in the strength of his performances and his standing as a reference point in British acting. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1993 for services to the arts, and in 2003 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He has lived in the United States since the 1970s, has been married to Stella Arroyave since 2003, and supports various charitable and environmental causes.