Anthony Hopkins has spent over six many years constructing one of the embellished resumes in movie historical past, headlined by two Academy Awards for Greatest Actor and a knighthood awarded in 1993 for companies to the humanities. Born in Margam, Wales, in 1937, Hopkins additionally holds the BAFTA Fellowship, the group’s highest honor, awarded to him in 2008 for lifetime achievement. Nonetheless, regardless of a filmography spanning Shakespeare diversifications and status tv, mainstream audiences most readily affiliate Hopkins with Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic psychiatrist launched in The Silence of the Lambs. Extra not too long ago, a brand new era has additionally come to know him as Odin, the King of Asgard in Marvel’s Thor trilogy.
Hopkins stays one of many busiest actors of his era, with greater than 150 display credit gathered since his movie debut within the late Nineteen Sixties. He voiced the robotic knight Jimmy throughout each Insurgent Moon movies for director Zack Snyder, performed Sigmund Freud in Freud’s Final Session, and took on a uncommon villainous function as William within the 2025 thriller Locked. Hopkins has a number of extra initiatives lined up, together with a Man Ritchie crime drama titled Spouse and Canine alongside Benedict Cumberbatch and Rosamund Pike, and a interval piece during which he’ll play Charles Darwin reverse Charlotte Rampling. That tempo of output, sustained nicely previous the age most performers retire, has saved Hopkins seen to film lovers, with many performances that deserve the identical status as Hannibal Lecter.
5) Dr. Robert Ford (Westworld)
Westworld imagines a high-end amusement park the place rich visitors act out fantasies inside a Wild West setting populated by lifelike androids known as hosts. Within the sequence, Anthony Hopkins performs Dr. Robert Ford, the park’s reclusive co-creator, a person who designs the hosts’ personalities and storylines whereas silencing the park’s darkish historical past and concealing his true intentions.
The primary season of Westworld builds its construction round slowly revealing how a lot management Ford holds over the park, and Hopkins performs that ambiguity by shifting between heat and menace inside single scenes, typically with none seen transition between the 2. It’s not stunning that the function earned Hopkins an Emmy nomination for Excellent Lead Actor in a Drama Sequence in 2017. Even after Ford’s central storyline wrapped, Hopkins saved showing in flashback sequences that added new context to the character’s motivations, guaranteeing he can be a part of Westworld till the sequence’ untimely cancelation in Season 4.
4) Pope Benedict XVI (The Two Popes)
The Two Popes dramatizes a fictionalized set of personal conversations between Pope Benedict XVI (Hopkins) and Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), the long run Pope Francis, set within the years surrounding Benedict’s actual 2013 resignation from the papacy. Hopkins performs Benedict as a doctrinal traditionalist wrestling privately with doubts his public authority by no means allowed him to point out, which provides him sufficient nuance to make a seemingly boring topic fascinating.
The screenplay, written by Anthony McCarten and tailored from his personal play The Pope, frames the encounter as a dialog between two males who signify opposing visions of the Church’s future, with Hopkins and Pryce additionally serving to one another elevate their performances. Fernando Meirelles directed the movie for Netflix, and the story unfolds largely by means of prolonged exchanges between the 2 actors, a setting that works as a result of they’re each formidable. The efficiency introduced Hopkins a Greatest Supporting Actor nomination on the 2020 Academy Awards, certainly one of three nominations the movie acquired total, whereas additionally including a significant publicly identified determine to his profession.
3) Richard Nixon (Nixon)
Oliver Stone’s 1995 biographical epic Nixon forged Anthony Hopkins because the controversial president, a choice Stone mentioned he made after watching Hopkins’ efficiency in The Stays of the Day. Hopkins initially turned down the function earlier than Stone satisfied him to rethink, resulting in one of many actor’s finest performances ever. Stone co-wrote the screenplay of Nixon with Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, mixing well-documented historical past with extra speculative materials linking Nixon to CIA plots in opposition to Fidel Castro, content material Stone described on the time as dramatic license however that has since turn into doubtless with ressurfacing historic paperwork.
On his flip, Hopkins resisted an easy impression of Nixon’s mannerisms, constructing his efficiency as an alternative on Nixon’s paranoia, ambition, and buried insecurity, from a poor Californian upbringing to the presidency and thru the Watergate scandal that ended it. The efficiency introduced Hopkins his third Academy Award nomination for Greatest Actor, certainly one of 4 Oscar nominations the movie acquired total, together with Joan Allen’s supporting nod as Pat Nixon. Sadly, Nixon underperformed commercially, grossing far lower than its $44 million funds, although Hopkins’ efficiency stays one of many movie’s finest parts.
2) Stevens (The Stays of the Day)
Tailored from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel, the 1993 drama The Stays of the Day reunites Anthony Hopkins together with his Howards Finish co-star Emma Thompson and director James Ivory. Within the film, Hopkins performs James Stevens, the fiercely loyal and deeply repressed head butler of Darlington Corridor. Devoted to his career above all else, Stevens spends the pre-World Battle II years blindly serving Lord Darlington (James Fox), a British aristocrat with Nazi sympathies, whereas stubbornly ignoring his personal blossoming emotions for the property’s housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Thompson).
Enjoying an emotionally repressed man doesn’t give a lot for a performer to work with, however Hopkins expresses many years of profound longing and heartbreak by means of mere micro-expressions, akin to a stiffening posture or a slight vocal hesitation. Because of him, The Stays of the Day turns into a mesmerizing character research of a person realizing too late that he has wasted his life serving a misguided grasp and denied himself real love. The efficiency earned Hopkins his second Academy Award nomination for Greatest Actor and stays one of many defining roles of his legendary profession.
1) Anthony (The Father)
Florian Zeller’s 2020 psychological drama The Father casts Anthony Hopkins in what’s arguably probably the most devastating function of his life, enjoying an growing older Londoner (additionally named Anthony) who’s dropping his battle with dementia. Tailored by Zeller and Christopher Hampton from Zeller’s personal acclaimed stage play, the movie brilliantly locations the viewers immediately inside Anthony’s deteriorating thoughts. By means of subtly shifting condo layouts, non-linear timelines, and actors out of the blue swapping roles, the viewer experiences the identical terrifying disorientation because the protagonist, as we’re additionally incapable of understanding what precisely is occurring and who the persons are who out of the blue seem proper within the subsequent room.
Hopkins anchors The Father with a towering efficiency that fluctuates quickly between childlike terror and plain attraction, with a deep paranoia that even manifest as cruelty. The function culminated in Hopkins profitable his second Academy Award for Greatest Actor on the 2021 Oscars at age 83, surpassing the document set by 76-year-old Henry Fonda to turn into the oldest Greatest Actor winner in Oscar historical past, and topping Christopher Plummer’s mark to turn into the oldest winner in any aggressive performing class. Guinness World Information subsequently acknowledged Hopkins for the achievement, giving him one other award so as to add to his intensive assortment.