Anthony Hopkins names the three greatest performances of his career: “Not ‘Silence of the Lambs'”
For better or worse, Anthony Hopkins has done it all. The Welsh actor has strutted the stage of the most prestigious theatres in the world and scraped the bottom of the Hollywood barrel in CGI-dominated action movies. He has brandished Oscars in front of his cheering peers and sat alone in a recording booth, reading the words of Zack Snyder. Through it all, he has maintained his position as one of the industry’s most respected figures, an actor who learned the tricks of the trade under the tutelage of Laurence Olivier and took Hollywood by storm as a serial killer.
For most fans of Hopkins’s work, his terrifying turn as cannibalistic murderer Hannibal Lecter is the high watermark of his career. Johnathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs was one of the first horror movies after The Exorcist to be taken seriously during awards season, and it remains a beloved classic for those who like that sort of thing. It won five Oscars, including ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Actress’ for Jodie Foster, and ‘Best Actor’ for Hopkins.
However, Hopkins himself isn’t too impressed with his performance in the film. “I learned my lines, showed up and was herded into my glass box,” he told The Daily Mail in 2017. “It was a good role, but for me, my best performances have been in Remains Of The Day, Nixon, and The World’s Fastest Indian, not Silence Of The Lambs.”
Hopkins was nominated for Oscars for the first two movies on that list, but not the third. 1993’s Remains of the Day was a classic Merchant Ivory period drama in which the actor played an ageing butler who falls in love with his employer’s new housekeeper, played by Emma Thompson, but is too repressed after decades of devoted service to act on it. It’s a painfully restrained and heartbreaking performance, though Hopkins lost the Oscar that year to Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.
1995’s Nixon was Oliver Stone’s follow-up to his conspiracy theorist take on the JFK assassination. Made directly after the controversial release of Natural Born Killers, it was a much less inflammatory film than the director’s most recent outings, and it bombed at the box office. Despite being a classic Oscar-bait performance, Hopkins lost the award that year to Nicolas Cage for Leaving Las Vegas.
2005’s The World’s Fastest Indian was a more personal film for Hopkins. Based on the life of New Zealand motorbike racer Burt Munro, it follows the main character as he attempts to set the land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah with a 1920 Indian motorcycle. “I’ve been cast as intellectuals, disturbed people and all that,” Hopkins told Female around the time the film came out, “But it’s boring, because I’m not like that… I am very strong and I love the vigorousness of life, and so Burt Munro was just my cup of tea.”
The film was not a box office success, but Hopkins earned praise from critics for his performance, even though there was plenty of condemnation from New Zealand over casting a British actor as one of the country’s famous figures.
