The Silence of the Lambs at 35 - Revisiting our interview with Sir Anthony Hopkins: 'I wanted to be like Richard Burton – famous as well as different'

This article was originally published in Radio Times magazine on 20th October 1994

It was only when he won an Oscar in 1992 for his part as Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer who cooked and ate his victims in The Silence of the Lambs, that Anthony Hopkins was convinced finally he’d become a decent actor. "After the old award came along I said to myself, 'What’s to prove now? I’ve done it'." Until then, he says, he’d wallowed in the troughs of insecurity, self-pity and alcoholism so common among our artistic brethren. Tedious stuff really.

"Now I’m happy and at peace, with no axes to grind," he says. Let’s hope that isn t really true. His brilliance is drawn from the furies lurking within him and, although today in Cardiff he is the very image of self-deprecating thespian bonhomie, as well as a mixture of hauteur and vulnerability, he adds: "In a way my parts have been therapy, providing me with a great purging of my emotions. They seem to have paralleled my own development. Maybe Lecter was part of me - aloof, cold, a bit closed off. Being an actor has put some frost on my shoulder, a touch of ice in my veins. I don’t like displays of emotion and don’t trust my own because they’ve got me into trouble in the past.

"I’ve become detached from life in the past ten years, which is probably why I look so calm. I don’t like being in crowds. In a strange way I’m free because I have no interests. I don’t care for sports, going to the theatre or cultural events. I don’t have many friends, hate going to dinner in other peoples’ houses, or to parties or restaurants. Food doesn’t interest me, nor does being with people for too long. I have no curiosity about anything, never have had."

This makes him sound like a curmudgeonly misanthrope, a morose Celtic bore, but nothing could be further from the truth. He provides wonderful conversational entertainment – some of it true – the beguiling Welsh lilt transforming to mimic whatever actor he happens to be discussing. He says his second wife Jenni, whom he married 21 years ago, after they met when she was a production assistant on one of his films, thinks he’s strange.

"But that’s the way I am," he shrugs. "At least I’m interesting to live with and keep her on her toes. My only quirk is travelling to LA and driving thousands of miles in a rented car, anywhere, sleeping in motels, talking to people, passing through their lives. It gives me a sense of freedom and adventure. It’s an aspect of myself that intrigues me. Maybe I am self-obsessed."

An only child, born in Port Talbot, he was a day-dreamer, hopeless at school because he was an undiagnosed dyslexic, he thinks. "I was very frustrated I could never grasp things quickly like other kids. I was good at drawing and the piano – if I had my chances again I’d like to be a composer. I was a bit of a puzzle to my parents and teachers. They all gave up, except one who said maybe I was a bit different. I was isolated, but I look back on my childhood with great fond memories. It was all grist to the mill. Out of my so-called 'handicap' I became angry, and frustration built up in me like rocket fuel, so when I left school I was determined to show the world. Richard Burton came from the same town. I thought he was amazing and wanted to be like him – famous as well as different."

His father would have preferred him to work in the family bakery. "I’d be at the piano and he’d come in with flower dust in his hair and ask what I was playing. I’d say, ‘Beethoven,' and he’d mutter 'No wonder you’re going bloody deaf.' When I told him I didn’t want to be a baker he said, 'Thank God for that. You’d be bloody hopeless.' He was a wonderful man, with that tremendous energy of the Welsh - 'sparks and smoke', he used to say. He was always on the move, and his eyes used to change colour, turn bright, bright blue, when he was excited. We had the odd argument - boom-boom! - because we were so alike. He never believed I’d grown up.

"He used to ask my wife to make sure I put Brylcreem on my hair. I called him Dick – I was embarrassed to call him 'father' – and my mother Muriel. It’s much more friendly. It’s taken me a few years to come to terms with how much like him I’ve become. He died 13 years ago and it’s as if he’s come home to roost in me. I was a little sombre before his death, took things too seriously. Now I’ve developed his sense of humour. Whenever I’d do Shakespeare he’d ask, 'Any shooting in it?' or he'd say, 'Shakespeare’s nice, but you ought to be making films like Burton.' He loved films."

It was his father telling him to get out of the house and do something which, fortuitously, began his acting career. "I joined the YMCA to learn snooker, was offered a small part in one of their plays and have ended up like this 40 years later. Life's a funny old process. Our paths are chosen for us in a way." He says he’s always been a bit mystical and had flashes of psychic vision. "I’ve never sat around tables with spooky people, but I used to get quite alarming insights which became a bit of a party trick. I’d describe peoples' houses to them and say they'd just had a tea stain on the table.

"Then I began to see my own life running backwards. Just before I received the old Oscar I thought, 'This is odd. It's happened before,' and a thought ran through my head like an express train - 'Your father died 11 years ago tonight. You’ve got it.' I’m not a Holy Joe, but it would be supremely arrogant to believe all this is something I’ve done myself. Life is too extraordinary for me to doubt there is some peculiar power that goes through all our lives." Although he is irreverent about acting, the Oscar made him proud. "It was wonderful. This nonsense about being cynical and putting them in the lavatory is an insult. If someone is generous enough to give you an award for what they think is good work, you should be gracious

"I don’t hang around with actors much and don’t know who the luvvies are or what they’re talking about. If a director tells me a film is 'going to be a journey of discovery' I’m out through the door. My approach is quite simple: I just want to be told where to stand. I don’t overburden my brain with too much material. I’m a very intuitive and physical actor. I learn my lines, show up and try not to bump into the furniture."

This is said without affectation, but of course it is a lie. He reads scripts dozens of times, and then hooks on to one aspect of a character. Last year, preparing a TV film about his Welsh hero, Gwyn Thomas, he explains, "I watched videos and listened to his vocal mannerisms. Then I went to the wardrobe department and asked for a greenish jacket, brown cavalry twill trousers which were a bit too tight and suede shoes. I looked in the mirror and thought, 'That’s him.'" In Alan Parker’s new film, The Road to Wellville, opening in January, he wears protuberant false teeth which give him an uncanny performance as Dr John Kellogg, the health guru and inventor of the cornflake.

He has well-known reservations about The Silence of the Lambs and now says, "It’s not wise to make films like that. There’s so much violence around. I don’t want to sound pretentious, but actors have a bit of a responsibility. I’d have to think strongly and deeply about doing a sequel. It would have been crazy of me to turn the film down at the time. I was in my usual naive state of being surprised to be offered a film in America. I’ve always been a bit like that. There is a great snobbishness in the theatre about the film business, but I don’t take any notice. I’ll go where I’m asked if it’s a good script.

"I used to take anything because I thought I’d never work again, but I’m a bit more choosy now. My American agent is like a killer. He beats at producers’ doors until they increase the fee. I tell him, ‘I want to do the job,' and he says, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not satisfied with the deal.' It’s nice to make a good living because I don’t want to be insecure, but ifs ludicrous when actors are paid $15 million to do a film. What are you going to do with that money? You have to farm it out somewhere, circulate it, otherwise it destroys you. If you keep money it rots you."

He knows about Hollywood because he lived there for ten years, leaving England in 1972 after, he says, "I had a bit of a punch-up at the National. It was my own stupid idiocy. People say I was a hellraiser. I wasn’t. I was just a bloody nuisance and boring. Actors get scared, and fear causes temper. I went through a couple of awkward patches and was a bit troublesome. I never wrecked a studio like some actors, but I had a fiery temperament which used to worry me."

Drink fuelled it and could have ruined his career if it hadn’t been for one day in July 1975 when he woke up in Phoenix, Arizona, having no idea how he got there. He attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and hasn’t touched a drop since. He goes to AA meetings three times a week, and says he had his last big bust-up on a set ten years ago. "I had a ferocious row with a ghastly pig of a man, a British TV director."

The Silence of the Lambs and subsequent films have made him wealthy, but he says he is frugal. "I don’t want anything. I don’t need three houses and three cars. I don’t give a damn about clothes, although I’m sick of actors walking around looking filthy. I like to keep clean and fit. I drive a Renault because the dealer is round the comer. I’m not interested in holidays. Hollywood is full of people who seek power and wealth and turn into monsters. They become even more acquisitive and, strangely, tight with money.

"I’m no pure angel but if you accumulate power and prestige you’ve got to have a daily checking balance where you must ask yourself, ‘Do I really need all this?' Towards the end of my time in Hollywood, the old alarm signal was set off when my agent told me they couldn’t pay as much as on my previous film. I was annoyed before I realised, ‘Hang about. The last film paid me more money than I’ve ever seen. I have a nice house and I’m becoming weird.' Hollywood is like an insect-eating plant. You sit by the pool thinking you should have more and more and it gradually closes in on you. It was then Jenny said, ‘We should go back to England.'

It is Wales, though, for which he hankers and where he may one day settle. He has already bought himself a burial place at Margam Abbey, outside Port Talbot ("I feel a bit odd about that"), but it will hopefully not be needed for many, many years. Meanwhile, he has developed a motto for himself. "Ask nothing. Expect nothing. And accept everything. That gets me through. I live in a state of total non-expectation and then extraordinary things happen. I can’t run my life. I make a few little plans here and there but beyond that it is none of my business."

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