The director who told Anthony Hopkins he’d never work again: “I said, ‘Fuck you’, and I left”
Considering he became the oldest-ever winner of an Academy Award for acting when he was named ‘Best Actor’ for The Father at 83 years old, it would be accurate to suggest Anthony Hopkins had the last laugh over the director who told him early on in his career that he’d never work again.
Gradually making his way up the ranks, Hopkins made his stage debut in the mid-1960s before graduating first to television and then film, even if it would take him a while to become a household name. Everyone was aware he was one of his generation’s finest, but that star-making part seemed constantly out of reach.
He was more than a quarter of a century in his career before Hannibal Lecter came along, a role he only ended up with when several other names turned it down. Despite minimal screentime, he earned his first Oscar for ‘Best Actor’ and continued making a mockery of the hard taskmaster who continually tore him down decades previously.
As an understudy and protégé of Laurence Olivier, it was only a matter of time before Hopkins crossed paths with John Dexter, the veteran theatre director who’d worked with some of the greatest names to tread the boards. Unfortunately, there was no shortage of bad blood between them.
“I was impatient with directors, because if you have doubts about yourself, somebody will pick up on it and they’ll attack you,” he admitted to The New Yorker. “I suffered that a little.” Dexter was quick to notice, anyway, pouncing on the relative newcomer less than ten years into his career and making his life a misery.
“The director talked to me like a child, and I would become volcanic with rage,” he said. “And I remember, it was in January 1973, I was doing The Misanthrope with John Dexter directing. John was a savage director, and he would pick on me as his whipping boy. One day I said, ‘Fuck you’, and I left. And I was warned, ‘You will never work again’. I said, ‘I don’t give a shit’. And I didn’t.”
Hopkins wasn’t of a mind “to be cowed by some screaming director,” so he simply turned his back on the production and walked away. Dexter would have been fuming, and possibly even quietly confident that the rebellious performer – who’d only turned 35 years old the month previously – had sabotaged his chance at longevity by seizing the first opportunity to sever ties with a play when the person overseeing it showed a temper.
Fast forward half a century, and with Hopkins a genuine living legend and one of the United Kingdom’s greatest-ever acting exports, precisely zero damage was done to his employability in either the short or long-term.
