“He called her an old whore”: the director Anthony Hopkins accused of murdering an actor
As much as it’s true that several directors have been implicated, and on occasion charged, for deaths that occurred on their watch, Anthony Hopkins was wading into potentially litigious waters when he suggested that a filmmaker was responsible for the death of an actor they worked with.
It was a bold claim to make, but he obviously didn’t give a fuck. Which isn’t a surprise, when the two-time Academy Award winner has always been one of the industry’s most outspoken figures, particularly when it comes to his disdain for his chosen profession and the people who inhabit it.
For the last 60 years, Hopkins has been head over heels with acting, but he’s always hated actors. He’s had run-ins with several directors, many of whom he eviscerated in a very public setting, but he reserved special ire for the auteur who might well be the most widely despised director in cinema history.
His disdain for Otto Preminger ran so deep that he actively compared the filmmaker, who was branded ‘Otto the Terrible’ in industry circles, to be fair, to Adolf Hitler. He was far from the only one who loathed every fibre of his being, either, with countless actors coming out of the woodwork to let it be known how much of a tyrannical dickhead he was.
In a risky gambit, though, Hopkins took things several steps further. “Well, you see, Preminger actually killed an actress who was an alcoholic,” he boldly proclaimed. “She was in Bunny Lake is Missing, with Laurence Olivier. It was Martita Hunt. She played the old woman living in the attic.”
Obviously, the general consensus was that Preminger was a prick, but how could working with him have driven someone to their death? “She was an alcoholic,” Hopkins elaborated. “And three months after that film was completed, she died of alcohol poisoning because she had nothing else to do but drink herself to death.”
“He called her an old bag, and an old whore, and a has-been,” he added for exclamation. “It simply destroyed her.” It was a bold accusation to make, with Hopkins insinuating that Preminger’s fearsome reputation was the sole cause behind Hunt retreating into the bottle, where she’d quickly pass away from the alcoholism that was only exacerbated by the dictatorial director.
However, it doesn’t take much to blow several holes in Hopkins’ salacious theory. For one thing, Bunny Lake is Missing premiered in New York City in October 1965, and Hunt didn’t die until June 1969, so roughly four years had passed between the end of production and her death, not the three months that he’d claimed.
There’s also the fact that Hunt’s cause of death was attributed to bronchial asthma, which had nothing to do with alcohol. He seemed confident that she’d passed away after three months of nonstop boozing after being driven to the brink by Preminger, when in reality, she’d actually died four years later from completely unrelated causes, which makes him look a bit of an idiot, in all honesty.
