The director Anthony Hopkins hated so much he felt sorry for him: “A very sick man”
These days, Anthony Hopkins is one of Britain’s finest exports: an iconic movie star and two-time Oscar winner who has given the world countless indelible characters. However, when he first began his acting career in the 1960s and ’70s in the world of British theatre, he admitted to being an angry, confused young man with an inferiority complex. At the time, though, he was also full of enough piss and vinegar that he wouldn’t take guff from anyone – not even the terrifying theatre director he accused of being a “very sick man”.
By the time Hopkins was cast in a production of Molière’s The Misanthrope in 1973, he had already been treading the boards professionally for nearly a decade. However, this time, he found himself working with famed director John Dexter, a veteran helmer who had worked with everyone from Joan Plowright to Maggie Smith to Hopkins’ mentor, Sir Laurence Olivier. Despite Hopkins being an experienced actor in his mid-30s, though, he still had a chip on his shoulder, which wasn’t helped by Dexter’s aggressive approach to directing him.
“I think I dragged up from my past, from my schoolboy years, that I wasn’t bright enough to do anything,” Hopkins told The New Yorker in 2021. “I had a kind of ruffian instinct about acting, but I wasn’t educated, and I didn’t have the confidence”. In fact, he was so insecure that people would think he didn’t know what he was doing that he would be combative with directors in a misguided effort to avoid showing signs of weakness.
Unfortunately, Dexter chose to handle Hopkins by talking to him “like a child”, which made him “volcanic with rage”. Hopkins believed the “savage” director took to picking on him, even describing himself as Dexter’s “whipping boy”. It all came to a head one day when Hopkins became so frustrated with Dexter screaming and shouting at him that he spat, “Fuck you” and walked out.
He claims Dexter bellowed, “You will never work again!” to which he replied, “I don’t give a shit.”
Amazingly, though, when Hopkins flew to Vienna to shoot a movie with Goldie Hawn called The Girl from Petrovka, he received an unexpected visitor. To his astonishment, Dexter flew out to meet with him in person, and Hopkins was certain he was about to be sued for walking out of The Misanthrope. Instead, Dexter was actually there to offer him the lead role in a New York production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus – although they had to work through their issues first.
“Why did you walk out?” Dexter asked Hopkins. The actor, in no mood to pussyfoot around, responded, “Because you’re a bastard, that’s why”. This prompted Dexter to finally address the insecurity that was at the core of the mixed-up young star. “You’re a much better actor than you think you are,” Hopkins claimed Dexter told him. “Stop all this nonsense.”
However, even though Hopkins worked with Dexter again on Equus and begrudgingly referred to him as a “brilliant” man, that play convinced him more than ever that something was wrong with the director. In 1975, he told journalist Joseph Egan, “I know John Dexter is a sick man. A very sick man. I don’t hold him in any contempt or hatred. I feel rather sorry for him.”
Sadly, Hopkins claimed that Dexter tried to make him feel like he’d have no career if he hadn’t cast him in Equus – and that was the final nail in the coffin for their relationship. “The longer I’ve been away from him and the production, I realise that I don’t owe him a living,” Hopkins grimaced. “He thinks, for example, that Tony Hopkins owes him his talent. Well, that’s simply just not true. He says about himself, ‘If it wasn’t for me, dear, you wouldn’t be anywhere.’ Well, that’s bullshit, too. That’s crap.”
