Anthony Hopkins

Sir Anthony Hopkins is a Welsh actor with two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards and a Laurence Olivier Award. He received the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2005 and the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement in 2008, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1993 for services to drama.

The famous thing is stillness. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs is mostly a man standing in a cell talking quietly, and Hopkins built the terror out of tempo: he strips out the small pauses where a human being would breathe, so every sentence arrives complete and unhurried, like something rehearsed. It was so effective that it became a cage. Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002) are a studio trying to manufacture a thing that only worked once, and Hopkins is visibly aware of it in both.

The rest of the range gets less attention and is where the acting is. James Stevens in The Remains of the Day is an entire life of suppression conveyed by a man declining to say one sentence. Frederick Treves in The Elephant Man is the compassionate counterweight to his own later monsters. Burt Munro in The World's Fastest Indian is warmth with no menace at all. Anthony in The Father plays disorientation from the inside rather than describing it from outside, which is the hardest possible version of that part. Alongside that sits an unembarrassed run of paycheques: Odin in the Thor films, Sir Edmund Burton in Transformers: The Last Knight, Methuselah in Noah. He has never pretended those were anything other than what they are.