"Herod, Hitchcock, Hitler, Nixon, Picasso: pick one of history's great softies, and there's a good chance that he's been played by Anthony Hopkins. Also on the list are Dickens, Danton, Freud, Yitzhak Rabin, John Quincy Adams, Pope Benedict XVI, St. Paul, C. S. Lewis, and the man who-though this is a matter of crunchy controversy-invented cornflakes. Last year, at the age of eighty-six, Hopkins appeared as the Roman emperor Vespasian on TV,"
"in "Those About to Die," the thrust of his performance being to treat the show's title with scorn. Even his portrayal of a man with advanced dementia, in "The Father" (2020), which won the Academy Award for Best Actor, emitted a disconcerting power. Vital signs were rampant. Human twilight, with Hopkins in charge, became a noonday blaze. Those who wish to trace that radiance to its source now have a map to guide them."
Anthony Hopkins was born on New Year's Eve 1937 in Margam, a suburb of Port Talbot in South Wales, and grew up as a taunted, hapless boy nicknamed "Elephant Head." He built a career portraying a wide range of historical and cultural figures, including Herod, Hitchcock, Hitler, Nixon, Picasso, Dickens, Danton, Freud, Yitzhak Rabin, John Quincy Adams, Pope Benedict XVI, St. Paul, and C. S. Lewis. Late-career highlights include an Academy Award-winning performance as a man with advanced dementia in The Father (2020) and an appearance at age eighty-six as Emperor Vespasian in Those About to Die. He repeatedly reflects on whether his life unfolded by chance or design.
Read at The New Yorker
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