Sir Anthony Hopkins(1937–)

Philip Anthony Hopkins was born at Margam in Port Talbot, Glamorgan, on New Year's Eve 1937, only child of Richard Arthur Hopkins, a Margam baker, and Annie Muriel Yeats. He was raised at the family bakery and was schooled at Cowbridge Grammar School in the Vale of Glamorgan, took the place at Cardiff College of Music and Drama in 1955 in his eighteenth year on the strength of his early stage work, completed two years of National Service in the Royal Artillery, and took the place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London in 1961. He met the actor Sir Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre in 1965, was taken by Olivier into the Old Vic Royal National Theatre company under Olivier's directorship, and through the late 1960s and early 1970s played the central young leading roles of the Old Vic season (Edmund in King Lear, Andrei in Three Sisters, the Coriolanus title role) alongside Olivier, John Gielgud, Maggie Smith and Edith Evans.

He made his film breakthrough as Richard the Lionheart in Anthony Harvey's The Lion in Winter (1968, his first major-feature credit, alongside Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn), took the leading roles in Magic (1978, the David Seltzer-William Goldman psychological thriller), The Elephant Man (1980, opposite John Hurt under David Lynch), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987, opposite Anne Bancroft), and emerged across the late 1980s as the leading classical actor of his generation working in Hollywood. He took the role of Dr Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme's adaptation of Thomas Harris's novel The Silence of the Lambs (released February 1991), playing the imprisoned forensic psychiatrist on twenty-four minutes and fifty-two seconds of total screen-time across the two-hour film. The film took five Academy Awards at the March 1992 ceremony (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay), the third film in Academy history to take the Big Five, and Hopkins's Best Actor Oscar at the lowest screen-time-to-Best-Actor-Oscar ratio in Academy history.

He reprised the Lecter role in Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002), took the central role in James Ivory's adaptation of The Remains of the Day (1993, the Merchant Ivory production for which he was nominated for a second Best Actor Oscar), in Nixon (1995, the Oliver Stone biopic for which he was nominated for a third Best Actor Oscar in the title role), in Amistad (1997, the Steven Spielberg slave-trade trial film, fourth Best Actor nomination as John Quincy Adams), Howards End (1992), Shadowlands (1993, as C. S. Lewis), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), The Mask of Zorro (1998), Thor (2011) and the four-film Thor sequence as Odin Borson the Asgard King across the Marvel Cinematic Universe through the 2010s.

On the twenty-fifth of April 2021 at the ninety-third Academy Awards ceremony he took the second Best Actor Academy Award for his performance as the title role in Florian Zeller's The Father (2020, the adaptation of Zeller's stage play on the experience of dementia, opposite Olivia Colman as the daughter). He was eighty-three years old at the win, the oldest winner of the Best Actor Academy Award in the history of the Academy. He has held the central single classical-actor reputation of the English-speaking world for the four decades since Lecter, has been awarded the BAFTA Fellowship in 2008, the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes in 2006, was made a CBE in 1987 and was knighted in 1993. The Hopkins name in modern English-language cinema carries the weight of the two Best Actor Academy Awards across thirty years.