Revealed: How Sir Anthony Hopkins, 83, missed his history-making Oscars win to visit his father’s grave in Wales – just weeks after he also skipped the BAFTAs to paint in his hotel room
- Sir Anthony received the gong for his heart-wrenching performance as a man with dementia in ‘The Father’.
- He landed his second Best Actor In A Leading Role for The Father – although he was a no-show at the event
- Chadwick Boseman, the posthumous nominee for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was considered the favourite
- Anthony has been nominated for six Academy Awards. He won in 1992, for his role as Hannibal Lecter
British acting royalty Sir Anthony Hopkins chose to visit his father’s grave in South Wales rather than fly to Hollywood where he was handed his second Oscar overnight – becoming the oldest ever winner in history at the age of 83.
Sir Anthony received the gong for his heart-wrenching performance as a man with dementia in ‘The Father’, but gave no acceptance speech until he woke up this morning near Port Talbot.
The star missed the Hollywood ceremony weeks after also dodging the Bafta Awards, deciding to paint in his hotel room instead. He only learned he had won Best Actor at Britain’s top film awards because of yelling and banging through the walls.
Sir Anthony was in South Wales instead of the awards show, held in Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, California, when the trophy was presented by last year’s winner Joaquin Phoenix.
Just before his win he tweeted a video of himself in a South Wales graveyard visiting his baker father’s tombstone. The actor wrote: ‘Richard Hopkins, my beloved father, resting in eternal peace…’ and recited ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, but couldn’t finish the words after becoming overcome with emotion saying: ‘God, I can’t do it, it’s too painful’.
After his no-show win on Sunday night, the award-winning actor shared a late acceptance video on Monday morning from Wales as he admitted that he ‘really did not expect’ his win.
Speaking in a short clip surrounded by sprawling Welsh countryside, Anthony said: ‘Good morning, here I am in my homeland of Wales and at 83-years-of-age I did not expect to get this award. I really didn’t.
‘I am grateful to the Academy and thank you. I want to pay tribute to Chadwick Boseman who was taken from us far too early, and again, thank you all very much. I really did not expect this, so I feel very privileged and honoured. Thank you.’
Sir Anthony said recently that his father Richard, who died in 1981, had inspired parts of his Oscar-winning performance. Hopkins, 83, won his first Academy Award in March 1992 for his chilling portrayal of serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs, dedicating it to his father who had died exactly 11 years earlier ‘to the night’.
He said of one scene where he rows with his daughter Anne, played by Olivia Colman: ‘What struck me was my own father was in me. I’m always on to her, nagging at her (Anne). My father was like that as he was dying, because he was frightened. He was afraid. Not mean, just irascible, scared. And it’s painful to see that. And you think of the hopelessness, the emptiness, the sadness of it all, and knowing none of us get out of this alive.’
Just before his win he tweeted a video of himself in a South Wales graveyard visiting his baker father’s grave, where he broke down
The actor wrote: ‘ Richard Hopkins, my beloved father, resting in eternal peace…’ and recited a poem by Dylan Thomas
Sir Anthony said his mother’s battle with dementia and his baker father Richard’s death (together during the Second World War) had helped inspire his Oscar-winning performance
In The Father: Hopkins portrays an aging man who refuses assistance from his daughter as he begins to lose his own agency; seen here in the film with Olivia Colman
Shock: To make matters more surprising, Anthony was not even present at the awards show, held in Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, California, when the trophy was presented by last year’s winner Joaquin Phoenix, pictured
Hopkins, 83, plays opposite fellow Oscar-winner Olivia Colman in the £18million drama, which critics have likened to a horror film for its compelling depiction of dementia and the toll it takes.
Hollywood ‘bible’ Variety calls Hopkins ‘brilliant and mercurial’ as the movie unfolds through the confused and fearful eyes of a man who rails against his daughter’s attempts to put him in a care home.
Hopkins has often spoken about drawing on his own turbulent family history to infuse his best-known roles, including the inwardly raging butler in The Remains Of The Day and last year’s Oscar-nominated turn as conservative Pope Benedict XVI in The Two Popes, but this performance as an embattled father raging against his offspring is, perhaps, his most poignant.
There has certainly been no shortage of personal drama to draw upon for, in real life, Hopkins has been estranged from his own daughter Abigail, a 52-year-old singer and acting coach, for more than two decades.
It is a subject so sensitive, Hopkins refuses to discuss it with even his closest friends. And an attempt to explain the situation publicly two years ago backfired so badly he has vowed never to talk about her in interviews again.
‘Anyone in Tony’s orbit knows to never mention the subject,’ a friend told The Mail on Sunday. ‘Tony was plagued by demons for years but he’s in a very good place now and this is not a wound he wants to reopen, particularly not in public.’
The actor became the oldest man in history to be awarded Best Leading Actor at the 2021 British Academy Film Awards earlier this month although he was again a no-show as he failed to appear at the virtual ceremony and later revealed he had been working on a painting in his hotel room in Wales.
Born in Wales, the soft-spoken Hopkins is the son of a baker whose career has seen him playing characters ranging from the late U.S. President Richard Nixon to artist Pablo Picasso, Pope Benedict and director Alfred Hitchcock.
But Hopkins says his first love was music and that he came to acting as a profession by accident. He is also an accomplished pianist and artist who has lived for years in California.
But he has been living in Wales during the pandemic,
Speaking just after his Bafta win he said: ‘I’m just so astounded.
‘I’m sitting here in my hotel room covered in paint and this cheer went up from next door – I thought, ‘Are they watching a football match?”
It was at that point he received a message from Florian Zeller, the film’s director, telling him he’d been named Best Actor.
‘I never expected to get this, you know.
‘I mean, I got to a point in my life where I thought, ‘I wonder if I will ever work again’ – an actor’s nightmare.’
Hopkins, 83, has a six-decade film, TV and stage career, but is perhaps best known for playing the brilliant but twisted murderer Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 thriller ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ for which he won his first Oscar.
His best lead actor win on Sunday made him the oldest actor to get an Academy Award, an honour previously held by the late Christopher Plummer.
Sir Anthony has been sharing his time in Wales with his Instagram followers, including this one enjoying the spring sunshine
Sir Anthony also visited the grounds of his school, Cowbridge Grammar, where he was inspired to act
He also tweeted this photo of himself walking in Wales just hours before the Baftas started last month
Distant: Anthony Hopkins and his daughter Abigail, who is now 52, in 1991. The actor has often spoken about drawing on his own turbulent family history to infuse his best-known roles
In ‘The Father,’ Hopkins plays an aging man who has refused any help from his family and who is beginning to doubt what is real and what is imagined. It is adapted from a 2012 stage play of the same name.
Hopkins told Variety that playing the role ‘made me very aware now how precious life is.’
He was made a knight by Queen Elizabeth in 1993, giving him the formal title Sir Anthony Hopkins.
Hopkins won on Sunday over the late Chadwick Boseman, who had been the presumed front runner for a posthumous, first Oscar in his final role in jazz drama ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.’
Born to Richard, a baker, and mother Muriel, the actor struggled to bond with a father who once told him: ‘You have a big head like Dumbo. Pity there’s nothing inside it.’ In contrast, he remained devoted to his mother until her death in 2003, even moving her to America to live with him.
‘I was quiet because I was such a dummy,’ Hopkins said. ‘My father was a very meat-and-potatoes man. He wasn’t a cruel man. And I loved him. But he was a pretty tough character. His own father was even tougher, one of those Victorians, hard as iron. But my dad was tough enough.
‘It’s in my DNA. I think I inherited the toughness of my father. I’ve mellowed over the years but I know what that’s about, the harshness and the hardness.
‘I’ve got it in me somewhere. I don’t like small talk. I’m not a very cuddly, touchy-feely person. As a child, I was very isolated.
Tour-de-force: Hopkins with Olivia Colman in the new film The Father. This performance as an embattled father raging against his offspring is, perhaps, his most poignant
‘Ask nothing, expect nothing. That’s my creed.’
A chance encounter with Port Talbot’s only other famous actor, Richard Burton, inspired Hopkins to head to drama school and launch his career in repertory theatre, where he met his first wife, actress Petronella Barker, Abigail’s mother.
The pair wed in 1966 and Hopkins got his big break the following year when he was spotted by Laurence Olivier and joined the National Theatre in London.
According to biographer Quentin Falk, Hopkins began spending long periods of time away from home and increasingly turned to alcohol to numb the pain of a marriage that was now crumbling under the pressure.
The relationship was all but over by the time Petronella announced she was pregnant with Abigail – who was born in 1969 – claims Falk, and the news he was to become a father ‘made him so tense he was like a bottle of soda that was about to pop’.
The following year, Hopkins met his second wife Jenni Lynton, a secretary, when she was sent to collect him from Heathrow Airport after he got so drunk he missed his flight.
Hopkins quit drinking shortly after Christmas 1975 after waking up in a hotel room in Arizona surrounded by empty tequila bottles with no idea how he had ended up hundreds of miles from home.
Newly sober, he tried to make amends with his child.
‘They had a sporadic relationship,’ the friend told The Mail on Sunday. ‘But it was very much on and off and then it was more off than on until one day it was totally off.
Hopkins, who by this time had become a US citizen, divorced Jenni and married his third wife Stella, 18 years his junior, whom he met when he visited her antiques store. By all accounts, she has been a stabilising influence.
Pregnant Emerald Fennell, Daniel Kaluuya and Sir Anthony led the triumphant British winners at the 93rd annual Academy Awards at the Union Station in Los Angeles on Sunday evening.
Emerald, 35, won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Promising Young Woman, Daniel, 32, took home the Best Actor In A Supporting Role for Judas And The Black Messiah while Anthony, 83, landed his second Best Actor In A Leading Role for The Father – although he was a no-show and later shared a late acceptance video from Wales.
Anthony’s, who admitted he ‘did not expect’ his gong, win marks the star’s second gong after clinching the same award in 1992, for his timeless role as flesh-eating serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs.
Chadwick Boseman, the posthumous nominee for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was considered the favourite to win at the awards event on Sunday night.
Winners! Emerald Fennell and Daniel Kaluuya (L-R) led the triumphant British winners at the 93rd annual Academy Awards at the Union Station in Los Angeles on Sunday evening
Unforgettable: Anthony’s win marks the 83-year-old star’s second gong after clinching the same award in 1992, for his timeless role as flesh-eating serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs (pictured)
Anthony once again made history on Sunday night as he became the oldest-ever star to win an Oscar for acting at the star-studded annual event.
That record was previously held by the late Christopher Plummer, who won his Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for 2011’s Beginners.
In The Father, Hopkins portrays an ageing man who refuses assistance from his daughter as he begins to lose his own agency.
The film was nominated for a total of six awards on Sunday, also nabbing the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar which went to Christopher Hampton and the film’s co-writer and director, Florian Zeller.
Hopkins is no stranger to creating buzz on Oscars night, as his victory for Jonathan Demme’s Best Picture winner The Silence Of The Lambs in 1992 created a bit of controversy as well.
His performance as Lecter, opposite Jodie Foster’s Oscar-winning role as Clarice Starling, enjoys not even a half hour of screen time in the film.
At 24 minutes and 52 seconds, Hopkins’ performance trails just one other – David Niven’s role in 1958’s Separate Tables – as the shortest to win an Oscar.
The 93rd Academy Awards marked the first time Tinseltown’s finest assembled in over a year, for a three-hour show that co-producer Steven Soderbergh described as being ‘like a movie.’
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hosted the delayed ceremony at the historic Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, where socially distanced movie stars went mask-free while on-camera or seated in the main show room.
An official spokesperson called this year’s event ‘an Oscars like none other, while prioritising the public health and safety of all those who will participate.’
93RD ACADEMY AWARDS WINNERS
Best Picture
The Father
Judas and the Black Messiah
Mank
Minari
Nomadland – WINNER
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7
Golden: Frances McDormand, Chloe Zhao, Mollye Asher and Dan Janvey (seen left to right) as Nomadland won Best Picture
Best Actress in a Leading Role
Viola Davis – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Andra Day – The United States vs Billie Holiday
Vanessa Kirby – Pieces of a Woman
Frances McDormand – Nomadland – WINNER
Carey Mulligan – Promising Young Woman
Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Maria Bakalova – Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Glenn Close – Hillbilly Elegy
Olivia Colman – The Father
Amanda Seyfried – Mank
Youn Yuh-jung – Minari – WINNER
Sweet: Youn Yuh-jung won Best Supporting Actress for Minari
Best Music (Original Score)
Da 5 Bloods
Mank
Minari
News of the World
Soul – WINNER
Best Animated Short Film
Burrow
Genius Loci
If Anything Happens I Love You – WINNER
Opera
Yes-People
Best Live Action Short Film
Feeling Through
The Letter Room
The Present
Two Distant Strangers – WINNER
White Eye
Best International Feature Film
Another Round – WINNER
Better Days
Collective
The Man Who Sold His Skin
Quo Vadis, Aida?
Talented: Thomas Vinterberg accepted Best International Film for Another Round
Best Sound
Greyhound
Mank
News of the World
Soul
Sound of Metal – WINNER
Best Cinematography
Judas and the Black Messiah
Mank – WINNER
News of the World
Nomadland
The Trial of the Chicago 7
Best Music (Original Song)
H.E.R. – Fight for You – Judas and the Black Messiah – WINNER
Hear My Voice – The Trial of the Chicago 7
Husavik – Eurovision Song Contest
Io Si (Seen) – The Life Ahead
Speak Now – One Night in Miami…
H.E.R. won Best Original Song for Judas and the Black Messiah’s Fight for You
Best Director
Thomas Vinterberg – Another Round
David Fincher – Mank
Lee Isaac Chung – Minari
Chloé Zhao – Nomadland – WINNER
Emerald Fennell – Promising Young Woman
Trailblazer: Chloe Zhao is the first woman of color to win Best Director
Best Actor in a Leading Role
Riz Ahmed – Sound of Metal
Anthony Hopkins – The Father – WINNER
Chadwick Boseman – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Gary Oldman – Mank
Steven Yeun – Minari
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Sacha Baron Cohen – The Trial of the Chicago 7
Daniel Kaluuya – Judas and the Black Messiah – WINNER
Leslie Odom, Jr. – One Night in Miami…
Paul Raci – Sound of Metal
Lakeith Stanfield – Judas and the Black Messiah
Best Animated Feature Film
Onward
Over the Moon
A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
Soul – WINNER
Wolfwalkers
Dynamic: Dana Murray (L) and Pete Docter won Best Animated Feature for Soul
Best Costume Design
Emma
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – WINNER
Mank
Mulan
Pinnochio
Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
The Father – WINNER
Nomadland
One Night in Miami…
The White Tiger
Best Writing (Original Screenplay)
Emerald Fennell – Promising Young Woman – WINNER
Shaka King and Will Berson – Judas and the Black Messiah
Lee Isaac Chung – Minari
Darius Marder and Abraham Marder – Sound of Metal
Aaron Sorkin – The Trial of the Chicago 7
Blooming lovely: Emerald Fennell won Best Original Screenplay for Promising Young Woman
Best Documentary Feature
Collective
Crip Camp
The Mole Agent
My Octopus Teacher – WINNER
Time
Best Documentary Short Subject
Colette – WINNER
A Concerto Is a Conversation
Do Not Split
Hunger Ward
A Love Song for Latasha
Best Film Editing
The Father
Nomadland
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal – WINNER
The Trial of the Chicago 7
Best Production Design
The Father
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Mank – WINNER
News of the World
Tenet
Best Visual Effects
Love and Monsters
The Midnight Sky
Mulan
The One and Only Ivan
Tenet – WINNER
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Emma
Hillbilly Elegy
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – WINNER
Mank
Pinocchio
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