Anthony Hopkins, an actor for the ages
From playing Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, to his latest role in The Father, the 83-year-old screen legend says he takes nothing for granted.
If you imagine that Sir Anthony Hopkins is anything like his dementia-suffering character in The Father, think again. The 83-year-old Welsh titan of the screen and theatre is keeping himself so busy — painting, playing music, posting on social media and, of course, acting — that he seems a big, joyous kid.
He has no trouble learning his lines even when many younger actors do. “I just read my part over and over and over and then repeat it until I forcefully memorise it,” the upbeat actor says over Zoom from Los Angeles. “It’s an exercise to keep my brain active, as is playing the piano and painting. And I read a lot. It all helps.”
Hopkins’ joy comes in part because he is happily married to Stella Arroyave, 18 years his junior. She is, the thrice-married actor has said, the love of his life. I first spoke with the Academy Award winner at the 2003 Venice Film Festival about his film, The Human Stain, in which he co-starred with Nicole Kidman and they even had a sex scene. “The whole thing was very respectful of Nicole,” he said in Venice. “I didn’t strip off, I just took off my top.”
At the time Hopkins was freshly married to Arroyave and it seemed he had found the fountain of youth. He even flexed his muscles to prove it, saying he’d been working out at the gym.
“I was eating all the wrong stuff,” he admitted in his melodic tones, “and I don’t think I was that happy with myself. I’d gone through a personally difficult time, not too bad, but I was a bit of a recluse. You do reinvent yourself when you get married, I guess.
“I feel fine, I feel wonderful. My wife’s a wonderful woman and we have a good time together. We have a lot of humour, I make her laugh and she thinks I’m very funny. She’s very good about making me eat well.”
If you look at his current Instagram posts, where his wife is sometimes in the background, it’s clear the happiness continues.
I tell him how I cared for my dementia-suffering mum in the last five years of her life and how I was told that the most important thing in caring for her was the love I was able to provide.
Hopkins had mentioned how his parents had passed away and that all he had was the memory of them, which remains strong. They had not died with dementia, however. “My father died 40 years ago of heart disease and my mother outlived him by many, many years,” he says.
“You just do the best you can to reassure them, so you come up with all kinds of reassurances. All I could do with my father when he was in hospital, even if I knew he was dying, was to make these strange promises. ‘Oh, you’re looking so much better, and you’re going to get out of here,’ I said. ‘And when you get out I’ll drive you from New York to Los Angeles, across America.’ Then a few days later he was sitting there with the road map of America and he was so happy even if he was already beginning to go. All his energy was depleted and all I could do was to put my arm around him. All the assurances you give them don’t work, but it may help them to know that you’re there.
“When my mother was dying, Stella was with her and she said, ‘Why don’t you just let go?’ My mother wasn’t a religious person at all and Stella said, ‘When you let go and you pass over to the other side, you’ll see your husband’. My mother replied, ‘Will it cost much?’.” He chuckles. “She had a great sense of humour at the end, you know.”
In The Father, Hopkins’ character, also called Anthony, rails against his memory loss and his need of assistance from his daughter, played by English actress Olivia Colman.
It’s a riveting story and one that many viewers, especially those with ageing parents, will relate to all too well.
What makes the film special is that we view the terrible affliction of dementia from the sufferer’s point of view. Based on a play by France’s Florian Zeller, which he adapted with Christopher Hampton, the film has deservedly garnered Oscar nominations for best picture, best actor for Hopkins, best supporting actress for Colman and best adapted screenplay, production design and editing.
Zeller, who also makes his directing debut, knew he wanted Hopkins for the role.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, so I know a few tricks,” Hopkins says with a laugh. “But it becomes second nature in a way; more common sense than anything, because, for example, I played King Lear on stage when I was in my late 40s or 50s. That was OK. But when I played it again three years ago” — in a BBC movie directed by Richard Eyre — “I was much better because I’m an older man and I have a lot more experience of life. Now that I’m 83 I don’t worry myself about overthinking.
“I don’t think I suffer from dementia, but I try not to think about it too much, just to learn the lines, show up and do it. And when you have a great actor like Olivia to work alongside, and with a wonderful director and a great script, that is the most important thing.
“My first scene with Olivia was easy because it was about an old man who was bad-tempered and he does not want to be fussed over. He says, ‘Leave me alone! I don’t need any help!’. I know how to do that because I’m a human being. Sometimes you’re just playing a version of yourself.”
Hopkins says the important thing about memory loss is to stay positive and not to put negative ideas into your brain because it will subconsciously believe them.
“When I was playing Anthony I’d look in the mirror in the morning and I’d tell my brain, ‘This is only a game, I’m not really suffering from dementia. I’m acting, OK? Brain, I’m acting’, because our brains are not that smart. They get us from point A to B and they make us run when we’re in danger. So you have to talk to it and say that this is not real because the brain will take a message saying, ‘Oh, your memory is slipping, we’re getting older’. So you have to keep prodding it, saying, ‘No, I’m young and strong’, and the brain will believe it. It does work, you know.”
Hopkins clearly has maintained a sense of humour.
“Oh, I keep mine going all the time, my sense of the absurd,” he says. “Life is absurd. It’s ridiculous. We take everything so seriously.
“Over the years I’ve tried to cultivate the art of indifference. I don’t mean coldness, but looking at the things I thought were so important and saying, well, it’s not important.”
He insists on not being addressed as Sir — “Just call me Tony” — and he doesn’t care much for awards. In 2012 he was even part of an anti-awards campaign when his film, Hitchcock (he played the famed director alongside Helen Mirren as Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville), was an awards contender the following year.
Ultimately, Hopkins’ sole Oscar win was in 1992 for best actor in The Silence of the Lambs. His portrayal of the charming cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, has gone down in cinema history, and he reprised the character in two sequels, 2001’s Hannibal and 2002’s Red Dragon. He won the BAFTA for The Silence of the Lambs and in 1994 for The Remains of the Day, also picking up an Oscar nomination for the latter film. In all, the actor has been Oscar-nominated six times, including for his stunning lead turn in Oliver Stone’s Nixon in 1996, and last year he received a supporting actor nomination for his portrayal of Pope Benedict XVI in The Two Popes.
The Silence of the Lambs was released 30 years ago and Hopkins makes an interesting observation about reading the screenplay for that film and the screenplay for The Father. “When the script for The Silence of the Lambs arrived from my agent in 1989 I read it and it was so clear — it was so bop-bom-bom!” he says. “I asked what was the part and he said Hannibal Lecter. I asked if it was a done deal and he said, ‘No, I’m not sure’. I said, ‘I’m not going to read any more until I know’. He asked why and I said, ‘Because it’s the best role I could ever dream of’. And the next day, the director, Jonathan Demme, flew from New York to see me and I asked, ‘Is that for real?’. He said yes.
“And it was like that with The Father. I got the script from my agents to read and it was like out of nowhere — boom! I phoned my agents and said yes, and Florian came over to Los Angeles. Then I had to go off and do The Two Popes, but I was worried that they would recast the father role. With a small company they have to raise the money — I know nothing about the business side of it. But then Olivia got the Oscar for The Favourite.” He claps his hands. It was a done deal.
Hopkins says he greatly enjoyed working on the film. “It was condensed and limited in time, so you make a choice to have a good time and do the best you can. I didn’t want the weekends to come because I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning go to work.
“It’s such fun to work with Olivia. She’s lovely and has no temperament and is so instinctive. She’s no-nonsense, as all of them were.” He likens the experience to working with Jodie Foster on The Silence of the Lambs.
“That was wonderful, the same experience exactly,” he says. “Jodie would come in to have a cup of coffee and sometimes we’d have lunch together, even if we stared at each other through a glass wall on set. I’d say, ‘What a funny way to make a living this is!’.”
Hopkins recognises that his career is on an upswing, even as he approaches his mid-80s. The former rabblerouser and heavy drinker — he has been sober since 1975 — has got his life and health in order, including a late-in-life diagnosis of Asperger’s, which he said in 2017 accounted for him being a loner.
“The last six years have been quite extraordinary,” he admits. “I did The Dresser with Ian McKellen and King Lear and both of those films were with a great director, Richard Eyre, and with amazing casts.
“I did The Two Popes with Jonathan Pryce and then came The Father. So I look back over my life and think I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”
The Father is released on April 1.
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