The most tender side of Anthony Hopkins: from being the feared Hannibal to dancing on TikTok

Young Anthony was not a happy boy. affected by the dyslexia and a beginning of AspergerHopkins used to get distracted in class: sitting at the back of the classroom, he was unable to follow the teachers’ lessons and, lost in thought, he turned his gaze towards the smoking factories of Port Talbotthe Welsh town where he had grown up and may never have left. But Richard Burton got it. So he too had a chance.

His classmates laughed at him and bullied him while the teachers looked the other way. No one had hope for the Hopkins boy, more dexterous in front of a piano keyboard than behind a desk. “I promised myself that I would be rich and famous,” said Anthony Hopkins in an interview with Variety. “And I have achieved it.”

“Suddenly, one day I found myself in an amateur theater workshop. What the hell am I doing here?”, he recalled in another interview, this time for Online Mail. The year was 1947. Twenty years later, Hopkins would already be on the stage of the British National Theatre. Sir Laurence Olivier he had singled out the lonely, unexpected boy as his replacement.

The legendary British actor would be replaced by Hopkins later, and only in voice. In 1991, someone found a treasure in the Universal warehouse: The scene of Spartacus in which Olivier talks to Tony Curtis about eating snails and oysters, which had been removed by US censorship for its homosexual connotations.

Much of his movies contain relevant scenes that take place in the bathroom. In 'Spartacus' (1960), emblematic is the scene in which Cayo (Laurence Olivier) asks his slave (Tony Curtis) about his sexual preferences ("oysters or snails"?). It was censored at the time of its release.
The scene in Spartacus in which Gaius (Laurence Olivier) asks his slave (Tony Curtis) about his sexual preferences (“Oysters or snails”?).
Warner Bros

The copy was badly damaged and neither Tony Curtis nor Olivier could be heard, so that the former had to dub himself. Olivier, on the other hand, had died two years before. His widow, Joan Plowright, fixed the problem.remembering that Hopkins, in the old days of the theater, was capable of perfectly imitating her husband’s voice.

The new King of Wales

By the 1990s, the kid from Port Talbot had become one of Hollywood’s most respected performers. Fifty years old and with over twenty experience in front of a camera, Hopkins had performed for David Lynch in The elephant Man (1980) and had had a correspondence with Anne Bancroft in the final letter (1987). But he lacked a great role in which to pour all his talent and seal, incidentally, his passport to posterity.

Anthony Hopkins in 'The Silence of the Lambs'
Anthony Hopkins in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’
Cinemania

And the paper arrived: When everything seemed closed for Gene Hackman to play Hannibal Lecter, the actor broke his contract and the cannibal doctor was back on the market. Not for long: Hopkins lent his face and lidless eyes to Hannibal, and Hannibal, in return, granted him a Oscar. Richard Burton, the distinguished son of Port Talbot, never won one despite being nominated seven times, but Hopkins had gotten it the first time. Wales had a new king.

From dancing on the grave of their enemies, to dancing on Tiktok

The silence of the lambs led Hopkins to act for Spielberg and Coppolato interpret Nixon already Benedict XVI And be nominated for five more Oscars. In 2020, she won her second statuette for The father: Hopkins was not at the Dolby Theater when his name was called, but in Wales, from where he sent a video thank you for the award the next morning.

The actor, who said in an interview that as a child he swore that when he became a star, “I would dance on the grave of those who had mocked me”has ended up dancing in TikTok and Twittersocial networks to which he uploads, from time to time, a nice video of him dancing to the rhythm of Leonard Cohen or playing the piano.

Hopkins, by the way. he never left aside his talent for music and, in 2012, the famous conductor André Rieu performed in Maastricht “and the waltz goes on”, a valls composed by Hopkins, who was in the audience.

In one of the videos that Hopkins shares on his social networks, he is seen dancing in a green Welsh meadow before the astonished look of his coach, who was trying to practice boxing with him. “I’d rather dance than fight”excuses the actor who, months before, had defined the revenge as the great motor of his life.

Anthony Hopkins’ mobile wallpaper is a photograph of the lonely boy he was, decades ago, in Port Talbot. “I have it there to remind me where I come from,” he explained in an interview. “Because I’m still that kid.”

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The most tender side of Anthony Hopkins: from being the feared Hannibal to dancing on TikTok