04/25/2021 11:10 PM
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Updated 04/26/2021 12:16 AM
With only his best leading actor nomination, Anthony Hopkins has already made history at the 93rd Academy Awards.
For his work e
El padre
,
the Briton became the oldest performer to aspire to the award in that category
.
At 83, Hopkins surpassed Richard Farnsworth, a contender for the statuette for
A Simple Story
in 2000.
I would hardly have imagined such a destination when I was growing up in a bleak gray suburb of Port Talbot in Wales.
He had no aptitude for school or sports
, and his tough working-class father regarded him skeptically.
"You have no remedy," the man used to say.
A chance meeting with actor Richard Burton, who had also grown up near Port Talbot and ended up becoming one of Hollywood's top stars, would help Anthony Hopkins on his path to acting.
The young man saw everything that he wanted to be reflected in Burton's trajectory.
Anthony Hopkins in "The Father," the film for which he won the Oscar.
Photo / AP
“I wanted to be famous.
I wanted to be rich, "he once admitted in an interview with The New York Times when he remembered his beginnings.
“I wanted to be successful, to make up for what I thought was an empty past.
And I became all of that. "
The relationship with Laurence Olivier and his relationship with fame
After passing through the Royal Welsh College of Music and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London,
Hopkins was invited in 1967 by Laurence Olivier to join the National Theater,
where he became the great actor's understudy for a production of
The Dance of death
by Strindberg.
And then he had his big break: Laurence Olivier had appendicitis and Hopkins had to replace him
.
"He appropriated the role of Edgar as a cat with a mouse between its teeth," Olivier would write years later in his memoirs.
Anthony was clear about what he was after: "I never told anyone about my ambitions, but I just wanted to go to California and be in the movies."
Anthony Hopkins.
He replaced Laurence Olivier and from there he built his great work as an actor.
Photo / file
At that time he was already receiving praise, but the truth is that he tended to overreact
.
During a
New York
staging of
Equus
, director John Dexter discovered that Hopkins had scrawled lots of notations in the margins of the libretto.
"What is this garbage?" He asked.
"I just learned the lines."
Alcoholism, an indelible mark in his career
Katherine Hepburn, castmate in
The Lion in Winter
(1986), also advised him to keep it simple
.
And so Hopkins obeyed, although as he grew professionally, his private life was getting more and more complicated.
He drank too much
.
One day he woke up with a hangover in an Arizona hotel room, not remembering the journey that had brought him there.
It was his limit.
"
I thought: 'I have to stop this because I am going to kill someone or myself. My life, from that moment, took on a new meaning
."
Anthony Hopkins playing Nixon in the biopic of the former US president.
Photo / filehopkins paper-
In 2020 he celebrated a new anniversary of his sobriety
.
"45 years ago I had a wake-up call. I was heading towards disaster. I drank to death. Then I received a message. I asked myself: do I want to live or die? And I said to myself: I want to live. Suddenly I felt liberated and ever since then my life has been great, "he recalled.
It was when he turned 38 years old.
His manners became lighter and his work simpler
.
And all that experience, that wisdom to manage expressive resources and not look too much, was seen in his most unforgettable work,
his Hannibal Lecter from
The Silence of the Innocents
(1991).
"What happened to your lamb, Clarice?"
Hannibal Lecter uses a monotone tone, which makes Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) bone freeze.
The man on the other side of the cell glass, the one who smelled her imperceptible cheap perfume, knows much more about her than the FBI agent would have liked to imagine.
He is one of the most iconic characters in Hollywood history, and it is undoubtedly thanks to Hopkins, who remembers that when he first started reading the script, he asked his agent if the deal was already closed.
"He said no, and I didn't want to read any more until I knew, because he was the best character I could have ever dreamed of."
Anthony Hopkins.
In his chilling portrayal of Hannibal Lecter.
Photo / file
Many times he was asked
how he had composed the most fearsome and intelligent serial killer of all, but he always replied that it had been easy for him
: “Jodie would come with a coffee in her hand, we would stare at each other through a glass wall and we would say text.
It is done.
We still meet sometimes to eat together and talk about how much fun this way of making a living is. "
Acting as something linked to common sense
A master of interpretation, he does not give air to know the secrets of his profession: "
Acting does not require being a genius or a great intellectual effort.
There will be people who are interested who seem yes, but no," he said in a recent conference to purpose of the
father
.
Anthony Hopkins, in his appearances on Instagram.
"I'm just old, I have been active for many years so I know some tricks.
The Stanislavski method is wonderful and I practiced it when I was young, but now it is more common sense than anything else
."
Either way,
The Silence of the Innocents
not only amused him immensely ("You have to act with humor," he often says), but it also gave Hopkins the stardom he so longed for, as well as his first - and so far only -
Oscar al Best Leading Actor, in 1992
.
He had other great performances in the '90s.
He was featured in
James Ivory's
The Howard Mansion
and in
What Remains of the Day
, which earned him his second Oscar nomination in 1994. The third would come in 1996 for
Nixon
.
Anthony Hopkins as a painter.
During the quarantine he gave free rein to his other passion .. Photo Instagram
Hopkins and his stage where he acted to earn money
Later he began to make decisions more guided by the economic than the artistic. This is how he was seen in films such as
Edge of Danger
(1997) acting hand in hand with a bear, or immersed in the mediocre sequels of
The Silence of the Innocents
, repeating the immortal Hannibal Lecter. Later it would be incorporated into franchises such as
Thor
or Transformers.
It seemed like her career had slipped into an irreversible coma, but in recent years she experienced something of a rebirth. He considers
The Father
the best role he had in years, the culmination of a hot streak that includes
The Two Popes
;
The dressing room
, with Ian McKellen; a
star-studded
version of
King Lear
; and a one-season appearance on
the HBO series
Westworld
.
With
Los dos Papas he
got his fifth Oscar nomination, as a supporting actor.
Now, in the sixth, he competes with Riz Ahmed (
Sound of Metal
), Gary Oldman (
Mank
) and Steven Yeun (Minari), although all four know that the late Chadwick Boseman is the almost certain winner for
The Mother of Blues
: Being Black. and being dead are two unbeatable conditions to win a prize these days.
Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcok.
"The father": a film that has its origin in the theater
The father
is based on the homonymous play by Florian Seller, also the director of the film, which tells how a woman (Olivia Colman) is seeing the mental deterioration of her father (Hopkins) suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
In this case, by winning his second Oscar award, Hopkins broke the record of the oldest leading actor to win the statuette, which until now is Henry Fonda, winner at 76 years of age for his role in
In the Golden Lagoon
in 1982.
She also outperformed Jessica Tandy, who won the best actress Oscar at age 80 for
Driving Miss Daisy
, as well as Christopher Plummer, who won best supporting actor at age 82 for his role in
Beginners
.
Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in "The Father."
As part of the risk group, he strictly respected the confinement due to the coronavirus.
And he entertained himself with social networks.
On his Instagram account, where he has more than two million followers, he wrote: "And maybe I'm not that sane."
The message was accompanied by a video in which he is seen painting.
He says he does it furiously, with brushes on canvas, to calm anxiety.
In another post, he added a video of one of the sculptures he carved: a dog.
As a plastic artist, although he does not have a defined technique and his works of art are different, Hopkins maintains some details: a lot of color and expressive eyes.
"The face is not important, the eyes are the most bewitching part of the soul," he says.
“I only paint.
I discover while I paint, I don't analyze it, I just do it.
My art is primitive.
A children's art, "he added."
It has to be childish, because I am a child
. "
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Anthony Hopkins (@anthonyhopkins)
Many of his original and signed paintings are for sale to the public and start at $ 5,000.
He has a virtual gallery where his art can be seen: anthonyhopkinsart.com.
Another of his activities was playing the piano in the living room of his mansion.
Because he is also a musician and even released a record,
Composer
, in 2012, with his own compositions, performed with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
His followers praised him for taking the confinement with a good attitude and a lot of humor.
And they viralized another of his videos, in which he danced to the rhythm of Drake and challenged Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone to do the same.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Anthony Hopkins (@anthonyhopkins)
Hopkins does not regret being in the last years of his life.
On the contrary, he looks for the advantages of experience: "When you reach 83 years old, I don't know if you are smarter or more stupid, but of course you don't waste time thinking too much about yourself."
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