Sir Anthony Hopkins

Anthony Hopkins is an Oscar-winning actor known for roles in many films, including "The Lion in Winter," "Silence of the Lambs" and "The Remains of the Day." Over the last 40 years, Hopkins has become famous for many memorable performances. Remember him as the schizophrenic ventriloquist losing his mind in "Magic?" As kindly Dr. Frederick Treves, befriending the hideously deformed John Hurt in "The Elephant Man?" As a fusty old C.S. Lewis, weeping before the wardrobe in "Shadowlands," knowing there's no magic to bring Debra Winger back? Then there were the Oscar-nominated roles, as US presidents in both "Amistad" and "Nixon," and as a destructively repressed butler in "The Remains Of The Day." And there were the heavyweight stage appearances as Macbeth and Lear, and the tortured Dr. Dysart in "Equus." In 2020, Hopkins played a man struggling with his memory in "The Father." The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it received critical acclaim, and earned him a fourth BAFTA Award and a second Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, becoming the oldest Best Actor winner to date.

Hopkins is perhaps best-known, however, as the cult icon Hannibal Lecter from Thomas Harris's notorious trilogy, eating people's liver with a fine Chianti. Incredibly, it was soon after he played this manipulative cannibalistic serial killer that he was knighted by the Queen.

Hopkins was born on New Year's Eve, 1937. After graduation in 1957, Anthony Hopkins spent two years in the British Army before moving to London to begin training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. After training and working for several years, he became a kind of protégé of the legendary actor Sir Laurence Olivier. In 1965 Olivier invited Hopkins to join the Royal National Theatre and become his understudy. The famed actor wrote in his memoir, "A new young actor in the company of exceptional promise named Anthony Hopkins was understudying me and walked away with the part of Edgar like a cat with a mouse between its teeth." When Olivier came down with appendicitis during a production called Dance of Death, the young Hopkins stepped in, making waves with his performance. Billed as Olivier's heir to the British acting throne, Hopkins had the momentum to make the leap from stage to film, which was his primary ambition.

Hopkins is also a composer and artist. His art studio is filled to capacity with various paints, oils, acrylics, tempera bottles, pens, markers, brushes, canvases; it’s all a riot of color and possibility. Strangely, even with paintings of all sizes on the walls, the studio exhibits a sense of organized chaos. His paintings are permanently and exclusively exhibited at Harte International Galleries.