The acting titan discusses his father’s death, the secret of his success and how he conquered youthful arrogance - thanks to Katharine Hepburn.
When Anthony Hopkins played King Lear he suggested that Cordelia’s corpse should be dragged around in a sack. He did not want the usual Shakespearean mourning scene for Lear’s daughter in the 2018 film adaptation. “Because she’s gone! Dead!” he snarls. “So putting her in a sack is saying, ‘We’re all going there. After all the glory and poetry, just a lump of meat. Destruction. Senility. Decay. The tomb.’” He growls, eyes wild.
Yet he is smiling, which he does a lot. Indeed, in the time that I spend with Hopkins — perhaps the richest experience I’ve had doing my job — as we discuss life, the universe and Hannibal Lecter, he is filled with a passion for the simple fact that at 86 he is still alive. We have met to talk about his latest film, Freud’s Last Session, but his joie de vivre means that he bursts with conversation — never more strikingly than when he speaks about his beloved father, Richard, on the day his old man died.
It was 1981 and Richard had succumbed to heart disease.”My mother [Muriel] was crying and I was looking at his dead body thinking about how life is a terminal deal,” Hopkins recalls. “We think we’re so hot, but we’re not. And as I stood there a voice in my head said, ‘You’re not so hot either.’” Hopkins was in his early forties then, flushed with the success of The Elephant Man. But he greatly admired his working-class father, who would come up with little sayings such as: “Today is the tomorrow that I was so worried about yesterday.” These remarks always helped his son put this troubled world into perspective.
“He said that most of the things he had worried about had never happened,” Hopkins says buoyantly. Richard told him this, for instance, at the end of the Second World War and even during the Cuban missile crisis. “So just get on with it. Enjoy yourselves. Let’s have a laugh before we go because we are not here long.”
Hopkins is at home in Los Angeles, blue eyes sparkling behind thick-rimmed specs. Behind him is a bookcase. I spot the Napoleonic tome 1812; a biography of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz; plus Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. He lives in California, out in the sun, with his third wife of 20 years, Stella, 68, an antiques dealer turned actress. She was born in Colombia, a world away from his home town, Port Talbot. If you want to peek inside his glorious house, pop to Instagram, where the actor frequently paints, dances, plays piano and larks around. “Because,” he explains, “what else is there to do? I can’t watch television all day.”
Quite often, though, Hopkins leaves to make a film. The man has racked up 90 so far and shows no signs of slowing down. In 2021 he won his second Oscar, for the dementia drama The Father, while this past year has already included a turn in One Life as Sir Nicholas Winton, who rescued more than 600 Jewish children from the Nazis, and Rebel Moon — a daft Netflix sci-fi. He is up for anything really and, this month, takes on Sigmund Freud in Freud’s Last Session, a thoughtful film in which Freud sits with CS Lewis (Matthew Goode) and chews over God, sex and death.
These are hefty subjects. “Yes, but I stand back from it all,” Hopkins says. “The problem is everybody gets overconcerned about everything — everything has to have a message. But nobody gives a hoot what Freud thought. Nobody has even heard of him. We’re too busy living and dying.” He pauses. “And so who cares? At the end Freud must have wondered what it was all about. His whole life was dedicated to psychoanalysis. Great pioneer. But he must have thought, ‘What’s it all about?’”
Still, it must be invigorating to act out such weighty matters? “Yes, but I try not to take acting seriously at all,” he says, smiling. “It’s a job I do. I can’t get intense about it, but I do work hard …” He pauses. “I can’t even say ‘hard’. But I do work thoroughly to get it right. I’m not dismissing films — God knows I can’t, it’s given me a life” — 84 Charing Cross Road, Remains of the Day, Meet Joe Black, the list goes on — “but I enjoy film because it’s easy. When I was young I was ambitious, arrogant. Then you come to a point when you think, ‘Cool down. It’s not important.’ Katharine Hepburn told me that. She said, ‘Remember, it’s just popcorn.’”
Did he always find acting so easy? “Well, I’ve had a bit of a strange journey,” he says. He enjoys garrulous tangents like this. “I had no idea I was going to be an actor. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Rob banks? My parents were worried because I was so bad at school. I’m not bright at all. I had no hope for the future, and then I fell into this crazy business through chance — one microscopic chance.”
He looks away, to somewhere only he knows, and talks about an audition at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff in 1955. He had never acted before, but read some Othello and received a scholarship.
“I can’t explain that,” he ponders, still baffled. “I look back at my life and think, ‘Maybe I’m a conman?’” He giggles. “I left college in 1957 and ten years later was in The Lion in Winter with Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn. How that happened I don’t know. No idea. None of it makes any sense to me and therefore I can’t take credit for any of it. What was the power in me that pushed me to this business? I do not know, but there was a voice that said, ‘OK, fasten your seatbelt.’ And I’ve had a most phenomenal life.”
Freud’s Last Session is based on a book, The Question of God, and Hopkins nods when I ask whether that voice in him makes him think there might just be something else guiding us along.
“At my age I take great solace in knowing I haven’t got a clue,” he says, softly. “I know nothing. I wake up in the morning and think, ‘I’m still here.’ At 86. I think, ‘Well, something very strange is going on.’” He rattles through Hindu teachings, the “divine in all of us”, Descartes’ idea that the pineal gland connects our soul to our body. “And there are theories about karma, but I’ve no idea except I’m very grateful that I’m still alive. A lot of my contemporaries have gone and I’ve learnt some lessons along the way.” (The only off-limits topic is his estranged daughter Abigail from his first marriage — he has been known to shout “Taboo!” if interviewers mention her.) His voice cracks. “But I’m still here. And that’s a wonderful feeling.”
Hopkins was born in 1937 to Richard, a baker, and Muriel, a pub landlady. He remembers the Second World War clearly, despite being a tiny child. He speaks about blackouts, the air-raid shelter and mimics a Luftwaffe plane flying over, rumbling out an engine noise he still knows so well. “My father would say, ‘It’s Liverpool’s night,’” he says. And then he talks about the end of the war, fireworks and celebrations, lights all over Europe.
“I look back with a strange nostalgia,” he continues. “It’s a rich feeling — being born into the world then. I remember the depression of the postwar years and the struggle my parents had. I remember it fully, like a texture in my life.” Did it inform the man he is? “Yes. It’s in my muscles, in my nature. My wife thinks I’m crazy. She asks, ‘Why are you always going back there?’ Well, that’s part of my life.”
He takes a deep breath. “American soldiers used to come to our house,” he continues. “They were stationed in Port Talbot, before D-Day, and we met a couple of them — Lieutenant Cooney and Captain Derr. My mother invited them over for tea. One was from Texas, the other from Oregon. Young men. And I remember the day that they left — they got in their Jeep.” He salutes. “And they were both killed in the Ardennes Forest, in the Battle of the Bulge. And I still think of them — they’re out there somewhere. And I think, gosh, all that waste. Human waste. Why?”
He told that story to Steven Spielberg — “Of all people!” — when they made Amistad, and goes on to say how much the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives, about US soldiers adjusting after the war, affected him. He is a man full of stories and emotions, somebody who, he admits, is “obsessed” with films about the war that raged while he was so young. I wonder whether that is why he took on the role of Adolf Hitler in the 1981 film The Bunker. He has played a lot of real life people — Picasso, Hitchcock, Nixon, one of the popes, CS Lewis in Shadowlands, Freud — but Hitler was clearly the trickiest to get right. (Hopkins won an Emmy for the role.)
“Well, you have to find a sympathy for the character or else it’s a cartoon,” he explains of playing the Führer. “But a producer saw the rushes and said, ‘Could you make him less human? You make him kind of Mr Nice Guy. But I said Hitler was human — that is the terrifying thing.”
I ask about a line in Freud’s Last Session, “History is littered with monsters.” Hopkins has lived through ten decades — what does he think of today’s monsters, are these good or bad days to be alive? “The whole evolutionary process is violence, survival, defence and attack,” he says, wicked grin whipping across his face. “There’s the potential in all of us to create or destroy. We think we’ll be above it, but we’re not. Look at the world today. We’re all monsters — deep down inside. It’s the boogie man. ‘Hush hush! The boogie man!’”
He spits this with lispy “fava beans and a nice chianti” relish — which reminds me of a story I once heard about Hopkins sneaking in to watch The Silence of the Lambs at the cinema. “I was in Utah,” he says, beaming cheekily, “doing a film with Rene Russo, and she asked if I’d take her to see it, so I put on the hat and sunglasses and, at the end, someone shrieked, ‘Oh my God, it’s you!’”
Hopkins, of course, won his first best actor Oscar for Lecter and his second 29 years later for The Father. An impressive gap, but not the record — that is held by his old co-star Hepburn, who had 48 years between her first and last triumphs. He smiles. I say that for him to beat Hepburn, he will have to win a third Oscar in 2040 — when he will be 102. “Just keep going,” I plead. It is not yet his time to be a lump of meat. He laughs. “I’ll try my best.”
Freud’s Last Session is in cinemas now. Sir Anthony Hopkins is starring in new Prime Video series Those About To Die, premiering on July 19.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London