The exact moment Anthony Hopkins’ career came full circle: “I’d have never believed it”
Sometimes, things can feel like they’re happening as the result of some divine timing, whether you’re religious or not, because there’s simply no other explanation. Everything can feel too coincidental, too perfectly aligned, but in those moments, perhaps it’s best to step back and assess the matrix of your life. If things are meant to come full circle, well, maybe they will.
That’s what Anthony Hopkins discovered when he found himself experiencing an overwhelming feeling of gratitude, hardly believing his goddamn luck that he had actually brought his teenage dreams into fruition. The Welsh-born actor developed an interest in the arts when he was young, and despite his humble beginnings, he managed to break into the world of theatre before graduating to the big screen.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that Hopkins began appearing in really notable productions, like David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, but by the early ‘90s, he was officially an Oscar winner. He, of course, won for The Silence of the Lambs, playing the terrifyingly smart cannibal killer Hannibal Lecter.
When he found out he’d been nominated, though, he was somewhere oddly specific to his love of acting. In fact, he couldn’t quite believe the circumstances. Hopkins had recently visited the very residence of the late Charlie Chaplin, an idol of his who inspired his pursuit of acting.
In his book We Did OK, Kid, Hopkins reflected on his love of the silent star when he was a teenager: “My father bought me a little projector so I could screen bits of Chaplin’s old films – The Gold Rush, Modern Times. I can still remember the smell of the heat from the lamp inside the projector and the way the light hit the sheet on the wall as I sat transfixed. I wrote Chaplin a fan letter about Limelight and sent it care of the post office in his Swiss town, and he sent back a polite, typed thank you.”
Years later, Hopkins had made it, finding himself cast as George Hayden in the biopic Chaplin, in which Robert Downey Jr portrayed the eponymous icon. Hopkins continued, “Then, 40 years later, at the invitation of Chaplin’s daughter Geraldine, there I was sitting in the garden of that same house in Switzerland where Chaplin had received my letter.”
Adding, “Robert Downey Jr, with whom I was appearing in the 1992 movie Chaplin, went too. When I sat down to play Chaplin’s piano, I suddenly felt that I’d dreamed my life into being.”
After all this time of admiring Chaplin’s work, cutting his teeth in stage productions, television parts, English films, and eventually Hollywood hits, Hopkins had achieved his lifelong goal. It really hit him at that moment.
Concluding, “After that visit, I went back to the Chaplin set, and there was a knock on the door of my trailer. Richard Attenborough came in and said, ‘You’ve just been nominated for the Oscar.’ If somebody had told me in 1952, when I was a teenager with that little projector, that 40 years later, I would be in Charlie Chaplin’s garden and that, further, on that same day, I would be told I’d been nominated for an Oscar, I’d never have believed it.”
