“One of those extraordinary cultish personalities”: The actor that inspired Anthony Hopkins
He may have gotten his start treading the boards and conquering the stage, but Anthony Hopkins always held ambitions of graduating to the big screen and dedicating his acting career to the world of film.
By the time he’d even made his feature-length debut in 1968’s historical drama The Lion in Winter, Hopkins was a well-known face on the London theatre scene after performing in a number of productions and becoming a fixture of the Old Vic.
Having Laurence Olivier as a mentor was about the finest education any aspiring thespian could ever ask for, with Hopkins absorbing as much information and tradecraft as possible from the legendary performer. He had to strike out on his own eventually, and when he did, he took his cues from the other side of the pond.
Hopkins might be a Welshman who learned from one of the United Kingdom’s greatest-ever actors, but it was American cinema that fascinated him as both an audience member and prospective movie star. “My favourites were those flickering, dark Warner Bros. movies,” he said per Screen Online. “I loved gangster films like The Last Gangster and Scarface and Angels with Dirty Faces.”
There was one star that he was taken by above all others, and he was hardly alone in that front. Not only are Hopkins and Michael Caine two of the all-time greats to emerge from Britain and conquer Hollywood, but they’ve got the exact same favourite actor.
“My favourites were Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Pat O’Brian, and all that, such matters. And I found I was fascinated by them. I was particularly fascinated by Bogart, I think because he reminded me of my grandfather so much,” he explained. “I had a great passion for Bogart, as I believe a lot of people have for some reason. He had one of those extraordinary cultish personalities, and he’s a bigger star today than he was when he was alive.”
By his own admission, the two-time Academy Award winner “always liked American actors particularly,” which helped shape what he wanted the trajectory of his career to be. “It set at an early age, when I was about six years of age, my destiny where I’d always wanted to go to America,” he continued. “When I went to America, I felt immediately at home there for some strange reason, and I still do.”
The 1960s gave rise to a number of classically-trained British talents who’d go on to become fixtures of Hollywood whether it was as leading men, character actors, or full-fledged superstars, with Hopkins always harbouring dreams of becoming one of them. He got there eventually, but much like his contemporary Caine, it was Bogart who planted the seed to begin with.
