Anthony Hopkins Biography

An enduring star of stage and screen, Anthony Hopkins remains best known as the creepy and manipulative serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.

Anthony Hopkins attended the Welsh College of Music and Drama and spent three years in the Royal Artillery of the British Army. He then went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1963. After first making a name for himself as a stage actor in England, Anthony Hopkins made his big-screen debut in the 1968 film The Lion in Winter (co-starring Katharine Hepburn).

He worked in television and movies throughout the 1970s and ’80s, including the ventriloquist’s-dummy-gone-wild feature film Magic (1978) and David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man (1980), but his star-making role was as the imprisoned but still-scary killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991, with Jodie Foster). Hopkins won an Oscar for the role, and the scene with him masked and strapped to a board, being wheeled in for an interview with police, became a famous movie moment.

Anthony Hopkins appeared in several films in the 1990s, becoming a reliable character actor as well as leading man. In 1993 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

His other roles have included playing writer C. S. Lewis in 1993’s Shadowlands and Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone‘s Nixon (1995). Hopkins played Lecter again in Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002, starring Ralph Fiennes).

His other films include The Edge (1997, opposite Alec Baldwin), The Human Stain (2003, with Nicole Kidman) and Bobby (2006, with William H. Macy).

Hopkins played King Hrothgar in Beowulf (2006), director Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock (2012), and Pope Benedict XVI in The Two Popes (2019, with Jonathan Pryce as Pope Francis I).

On TV, Anthony Hopkins played the manipulative world-maker Dr. Robert Ford on Westworld (2016-2018).

In 2021 Hopkins won an Oscar as best actor for his titular role in The Father (2020).