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Born to Richard Arthur and Muriel, december 31, 1937 in Margam, near Port
Talbot, Wales, Anthony Hopkins was the only child. He was educated at Cowbridge
Grammar School. Then was drawn to the theatre while attending the YMCA at age
17, and later learned the basics of his craft at London's Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art. In 1960, Hopkins made his stage bow in The Quare Fellow, and then
spent four years in regional repertory before his first London success in Julius
Caesar. He graduated a Silver Medalist in 1963 and promptly joined the Phoenix
Theater in Leicester. His next move was to the Liverpool Playhouse and
Hornchurch Repertory Company. In 1965 he was invited to audition for Sir
Laurence Olivier, then director of the National Theater at the Old Vic. Two
years later, Hopkins was Olivier’s understudy in Strindberg’s Dance of Death.
Hopkins made his film debut in 1967, playing Richard the Lionhearted in The Lion
in Winter, starring Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn. He received a British
Academy Award nomination and the film received an Academy Award as Best Picture.
Anthony achieved international recognition for strong dramatic acting in the
1970s and 1980s, and notoriety for the monstrous credibility of his Hannibal
Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (1990). A respected theatre and television actor,
his best film performances are those which allow him a little scope for
theatricality. His Captain Bligh in the 1984 version of The Bounty rivalled
Charles Laughton's; Richard Attenborough discovered his sinister qualities in
Magic (1978); and David Lynch cast him effectively as Dr Treves in The Elephant
Man (1980). His more subdued acting skills are evident in 84 Charing Cross Road
(1986), which began life as a BBC television play. More recently, he has taken
out a patent on the emotional reticence of the middle-aged English male with a
restrained performance as a repressed Edwardian patriarch in Howard's End
(1991), as a butler struggling with feelings while the world turns in Remains of
the Day (1993), and as the writer C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands (1993). More
irrepressibly, he has punctuated this streak of constricted Englishness with a
wonderfully over-the-top performance as the Dutchman Van Helsing in Bram
Stoker's Dracula (1992). His more recent films include John Schlesinger's The
Innocent (1993.), and the epically melodramatic Legends of the Fall (1994). He
played the title role in Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995). Anthony Hopkins was named
Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Honour’s List, June
1987. He received a knighthood in 1993.
Source:
netglimse.com
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