The “lightning bolt” of an actor Anthony Hopkins was convinced would “kill us all”
Having started on stage in the 1960s, Anthony Hopkins worked his way up to the big screen sans any connection to the illustrious world of acting, but if other working-class actors could find success, why not him?
“As a 17-year-old boy who didn’t know anything, something sparked me, and I got a scholarship to an acting school in South Wales,” he told the New York Times. “I’d never acted in my life. But I did an audition and they gave me a scholarship”.
Luckily, the 1950s saw the rise of social realism and ‘angry young men’ plays, novels, and films, with the likes of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Entertainer, and Look Back in Anger ushering in a new era of working-class representation that spoke of post-war disillusionment, economic hardship, and dead-end jobs, and it is within this movement that the actor found his golden ticket.
Hopkins went to see one of these plays, and that’s when everything changed, as he recalled, “I remember going to see a play with the great Peter O’Toole at the Bristol Old Vic. He was playing Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, and onto the stage came this lightning bolt: Peter O’Toole. A very dangerous actor. I thought, ‘God, if he stepped off the stage, he’d come and kill us all’.”
However, Hopkins appreciated the performance and then carried on with his career, keeping up his tenure as a theatre actor. Then, finally, he got to meet O’Toole. “Ten years later, I was in the National Theatre playing Andrei in Laurence Olivier’s production of Three Sisters by Chekhov. Knock on the door at the end of the evening, who should be there? Peter O’Toole. Now that’s weird. He said, ‘I want you to do a film test for me. It’s a film with Katharine Hepburn called The Lion in Winter‘.”
The actor couldn’t believe his luck; a decade before, he’d been watching this magnificent, incendiary presence on stage, and now he was being approached to work with him. O’Toole was a terrific actor, working extensively in the theatre in various Shakespearean roles, including Olivier’s Hamlet, while making his film debut in one of the most lauded movies of all time, Lawrence of Arabia. I
t’s not hard to see why Hopkins was so inspired by him, whose theatrical training prepared him for literally anything that came his way, whether that be musicals, gritty dramas or even erotic epics.
The Lion in Winter was Hopkins’ feature film debut, and from there, his career in front of the camera was firmly secured. Despite the fact that theatre played such a prominent role in the early years of his career, the 1980s marked the end of his time as a star of the stage, taking inspiration from O’Toole’s equal success on the big screen instead.
