The Greatest Anthony Hopkins Films Followers Want To Watch
Despite being well into his fifties, Anthony Hopkins confirmed his status as a Hollywood leading man when he won the Best Actor Oscar for playing Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs 1991. This wasn’t the beginning of his career, though. The Welsh-born actor had a full career before that, on stage, television, and film.
Throughout his career, Hopkins has demonstrated great range, playing everything from Shakespearean madmen to reserved butlers to the Norse god Odin in Marvel’s Thor franchise. Hopkins occupies the rare space as both an actor respected for his craft and a movie star whose name sells tickets. For further proof, look no further than these defining Anthony Hopkins movies.
1. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Hopkins was neither the first nor the last person to portray Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the flesh-eating man of culture from Thomas Harris’s novels. However, he remains the definitive interpretation of the horror great, thanks to his chilling performance in the Academy Award winner, The Silence of the Lambs.
The Silence of the Lambs might be the most empathetic horror movie ever made, as director Jonathan Demme, working from a script by Ted Tally, uses his camera to remind viewers of the vulnerable position of FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster). That approach underscores the menace of Lecter, allowing Hopkins to strike fear in his audience’s hearts with just a greeting and a smile.
2. The Father (2020)
While Hopkins had his big break late in life, few expected him to have another great performance in his 80s. And yet, Hopkins shocked everyone with his subtle and heartbreaking role in Florian Zeller’s The Father. As a man suffer
ing from dementia, Hopkins switches from delightful and playful to bitter and cruel, sometimes within the same screen. The script by Zeller and Christopher Hampton, adapting Zeller’s play Le Père, takes an unsparing look at the disease, with moments both terrifying and heart-wrenching, played to perfection by Olivia Coleman, Rufus Sewell, Olivia Williams, and more. Hopkins holds the entire work together with his take on a man struggling to make sense of a world changing around him. Since the actor also picked up his second Oscar for his performance, The Father stands out as one of the must-see Anthony Hopkins movies.
3. The Elephant Man (1980)
Anyone who doesn’t know the director’s visual interests may not realize that The Elephant Man comes from the surreal master David Lynch, who co-wrote the screenplay with Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren. Most of the story of John Merrick, portrayed here by John Hurt under heavy makeup, feels in many ways like a Merchant Ivory film.
Aiding that feeling is Hopkins as surgeon Frederick Treves, who takes Merrick from a freak show and treats him with dignity. The movie has its big emotional moments, as fitting such a desperate situation, but Hopkins’s steady portrayal keeps the film from veering into easy schmaltz.
4. The Lion in Winter (1968)
The television phenomenon Game of Thrones featured some of Britain’s greatest thespians, but Hopkins never joined his contemporaries Jonathan Pryce or Peter Vaughan in the cast. Those who wish they could have seen Hopkins in Westeros would do well to seek out the first film adaptation of the James Goldman play The Lion in Winter, directed by Anthony Harvey and written by Goldman.
Set on Christmas Eve late in the reign of King Henry II, the film follows the monarch’s struggle to choose an heir among his three sons, including Hopkins as the ferocious Richard the Lionheart. The film has all of the scheming and palace intrigue that Game of Thrones fans adore, especially from Kathrine Hepburn’s imperious Queen Eleanor.
5. The Remains of the Day (1993)
His presence is Hopkins’s greatest gift and obstacle as an actor. When invested in a role, he can command attention with just a chuckle or raise of the eyebrow. When not invested, his disinterest slowed his movies to a stop (see Thor).
The Remains of the Day demonstrates the former phenomenon. The film adaptation, directed by James Ivory and written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, stars Hopkins as the dutiful butler Mr. Stevens. Stevens’s devotion to service has left him feeling empty at the end of his life, both because of his former employer’s support of fascist Germany and because he missed the opportunity for a relationship with housekeeper Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson). Only a performer as nuanced as Hopkins can portray the depths inside of the stoic Stevens.
6. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Francis Ford Coppola’s vibrant horror movie captures the overheated and romantic tones of the Bram Stoker novel. As a result, Bram Stoker’s Dracula has tons of big performances, which would threaten to drown out a supporting character like Dr. Abraham Van Helsing.
And yet, Hopkins makes Van Helsing a memorable figure, thanks to his skill at playing understatement. Hopkins plays Van Helsing as an uncouth academic and crusader, who battles the undead and offends polite society with a sly twinkle in his eye and a self-satisfied chuckle.
7. 84 Charing Cross Road (1987)
Hopkins has the less flashy of the two lead roles, playing opposite — in a way — of Anne Bancroft in 84 Charing Cross Road. Bancroft’s American book enthusiast Helen, who begins a two-decade-long correspondence with a reserved English bookseller Frank (Hopkins), gets to go big and brassy when she addresses her monologues to the camera. Frank stays in his London bookstore, where he crafts gentle letters in response.
But Hopkins never allows his character to slip into the background of the movie, directed by David Jones and written by Hugh Whitemore. When Frank adopts Helen’s fourth-wall-breaking mode of speaking, viewers realize the presence that Hopkins brought to the part.
8. The Two Popes (2019)
Even to the faithful, director Fernando Meirelles’s The Two Popes sounds like a slog. Written by Anthony McCarten, the screenwriter behind dull biopics Bohemian Rhapsody and The Theory of Everything, The Two Popes follows Pope Benedict XVI (Hopkins) and his successor Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), now known as Pope Francis, spending the day together.
The duo discuss matters of faith and politics and the mundane, which would be as interminable as it sounds were it not coming from two titans of the screen. Hopkins and Pryce avoid all of the potential pomp of their story (even if Fernando Meirelles restores it with the movie’s unnecessary coda), making the film feel natural and lived in.
9. Magic (1978)
Modern horror fans might be disappointed when they see the 1978 film Magic. Despite an infamous creepy trailer, Magic doesn’t quite deliver the extreme scares that one expects from the story about a ventriloquist figure who drives its performer to acts of murder.
However, for those not looking for Chucky or M3Gan levels of carnage, Magic tells a spooky tale, anchored by Hopkins as desperate stage magician Corky Withers, whose late success comes from his homicidal dummy Fats. Director Richard Attenborough and screenwriter William Goldman, adapting his own novel, emphasize Corky’s psychological breakdown, portrayed with just a glance or shuffling of feet by Hopkins.
10. Titus (1999)
Where most of the entries on this list thus far have praised Hopkins’s more understated work, Titus succeeds because the actor goes big. With Titus, the idiosyncratic stage director Julie Taymor adapts Shakespeare’s most upsetting play Titus Andronicus, casting Hopkins as the titular vengeful General. Despite the fury of Taymor’s maximalist approach, Hopkins commands the screen, making viewers believe in the brutality of Titus’s actions, even when they defy logic.
11. The Mask of Zorro (1998)
For all his gifts as an actor, Hopkins does have his limits. Nii, audiences can be forgiven for questioning the decision to cast the Welsh actor as the Mexican Don Diego de la Vega, better known as Zorro, in The Mask of Zorro.
The Spaniard Antonio Banderas fits better for Alejandro Murrieta, who becomes the new masked hero to take over for the older Don de la Vega, despite romancing Hopkins’s countrywoman Catherine Zeta-Jones as Elena Montero. Whatever shortcomings these nationalities might present, director Martin Campbell crafts a cracking adventure. The script by John Eskow, Ted Elliott, and Terry Rossio moves at a quick pace and Hopkins makes for a dignified mentor to the younger hero.
12. Chaplin (1992)
Before Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. poured his passions into Chaplin, a biography of the great silent movie star Charlie Chaplin.
While Downey Jr.’s committed take on the troubled Hollywood icon drives the movie, director Richard Attenborough fills the movie with other great character actors, including Kevin Dunn, Diane Lane, and of course Hopkins. Attenborough gives Hopkins one of the more thankless parts in the movie. As the editor of Chaplin’s biography, Hopkins’s George Hayden just asks questions of his elderly subject (played by Downey Jr. in distracting old-age make-up). Still, it’s Hayden’s questions that organize the story, moved along by Hopkins’s understated style.
13. Howards End (1992)
A year before The Remains of the Day, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapted the E.M. Forester novel Howards End. The story of three families at the start of the 20th century, Howards End stars Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter as sisters Margaret and Helen Schlegel, who form a friendship with the rich matriarch Ruth Wilcox (Vanessa Redgrave).
As usual, Ivory takes a stately but not subtle approach to the material, which makes Hopkins’s arrival as Henry Wilcox all the more welcome. Henry’s romance with Margaret propels the story, resulting in a pleasing, if not ground-breaking, film.
14. Nixon (1995)
Some viewers may find the 1995 biopic Nixon over the top to an almost cartoonish degree. But Richard Milhouse Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, was a loud man. Director Oliver Stone uses every minute of the three-hour running time to create a thunderous portrait of the disgraced president, using the script he co-wrote with Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson to explore pet issues like conspiracy and media-based madness.
Hopkins neither looks nor sounds like the person he’s playing, but he matches the intensity of Stone’s film, makingNixonone of the most impressive Anthony Hopkins movies.
15. Shadowlands (1993)
It’s hard to think of a person more unlike Richard Nixon than C.S. Lewis, the Christian author best known for his Chronicles of Narnia fantasy novels. In Shadowlands, Hopkins plays Lewis as a thoughtful intellectual, whose tragic romance with American Joy Davidman (Debra Winger) challenges his beliefs.
Hopkins reunites with director Richard Attenborough, working from a script by William Nicholson, to tell a reserved movie about love late in life. Despite its repulsion from schmaltz, Shadowlands still gives Hopkins opportunities to show off his chops, as in a powerful scene in which he rejects a colleague’s empty consolation for Joy’s death.
16. Fracture (2007)
While Hannibal Lecter made him famous, Hopkins did not seek out many thriller roles. One exception comes in Fracture, directed by Gregory Hoblit from a screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers. After killing his wayward wife, wealthy engineer Ted Crawford plays games with the hotshot district attorney Willy Beachum, played by Ryan Gosling.
As with Lecter, Crawford has a cold intelligence that he uses to toy with others, including the game Beachum. Gosling can’t quite hold the screen against the overpowering Hopkins, but that imbalance just increases the tension of the film.
17. Amistad (1997)
As a follow-up to Schindler’s List, Steven Speilberg’s Amistad feels overstuffed and self-serious, lacking the poetry of the prior film. However, the movie does boast some strong turns, including Hopkins as former president John Quincy Adams.
Adams’s climactic speech in support of enslaved Africans (led by Djimon Hounsou’s Cinqué) who kill their captors aboard the titular ship, allows Spielberg to stretch his familiar filmmaking muscles. Hopkins speaks in soft tones during Adams’s address, a reserve that tempers the rising John Williams score or the drama of the slow push onto the actor’s face. The restrained performance allows Adams’s words and ideas to speak for themselves, no cinematic embellishment needed.
18. The Edge (1997)
Given all of his respectable performances, some might forget that Hopkins broke out by playing pulp in the excellent, but still outrageous, The Silence of the Lambs. With that in mind, the Lee Tamahori film The Edge feels less like a detour and more a continuation of Hopkins’s award-winning work.
The script by David Mamet involves the writer’s familiar themes of masculinity and combat. Hopkins plays billionaire Charles Morse, who crashes in the Alaskan wilderness with his trophy wife’s lover (Alec Baldwin). As the two fight to survive against the elements, including a very dedicated bear, they also test their manhood, giving Hopkins the chance to do some capital-A Acting.
19. Noah (2014)
Near the start of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, CGI rock monsters called “Watchers” describe an epic battle involving a warrior who vanquishes his enemies with fire from his sword. Aronofsky presents the battle like something out of a superhero movie, infusing the biblical tale with modern blockbuster effects.
But when Hopkins plays that warrior Methuselah in his late age, he doesn’t act like a fierce fighter. Rather, Hopkins plays Methuselah as a wise old man who advises the troubled Noah (Russell Crowe). Hopkins’s ability to lend gravitas to small parts allows him to stay within the craziness of Aronofsky’s movie, co-written with Ari Handel, without getting lost in the absurd proceedings.
20. Hannibal (2000)
Despite the success of The Silence of the Lambs, moviegoers reacted with revulsion towards the follow-up, Hannibal. It wasn’t just the loss of Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, replaced by Julianne Moore, that put off viewers, but also the movie’s aggressive approach.
Ridley Scott replicates the furious and delirious prose of the Thomas Harris novel by adapting some of the most upsetting scenes. While Hannibal disappointed viewers, it also gave Hopkins a chance to play around with his signature character. His ghoulish and delightful take shows no signs of the weight of expectation, proving Hopkins’s flexibility as an actor.
21. Desperate Hours (1990)
In the Michael Cimino-directed thriller Desperate Hours, a brilliant psychopath manipulates his lawyer into helping him escape from prison and takes hostage a Vietnam veteran and his family.
Despite what one might assume, Hopkins does not play the brilliant psychopath. That part goes to star Mickey Rourke. Instead, Hopkins plays suburban dad Tim Cornell, alongside Mimi Rodgers as his wife Nora. No, Hopkins does not make for a convincing regular guy, but that uncanny quality gives the film an extra sense of danger and increases the tension.
22. The World’s Fastest Indian (2005)
The World’s Fastest Indian should not be as entertaining as it is. Based on the true story of New Zealand racer Burt Munro, The World’s Fastest Indian has a Forrest Gump quality in which a likable oddball goes on a strange adventure, helped along by the support of everyone he meets. Writer and director Roger Donaldson does nothing interesting with the story, filling the film with insert shots of people smiling in wonder and admiration at everything that Munro does. And yet, Hopkins refuses to make his character as affable as the script assumes, playing Burt as a man who mumbles and gets distracted by anything that’s not his speed bike.
23. Legends of the Fall (1994)
Watching Legends of the Fall, one gets the sense that director Edward Zwick cast Hopkins in his adaptation of the Jim Harrison novel Legends of the Fall to offset his lead, Brad Pitt. While Pitt had all the heat of a young Hollywood star, audiences in the early 90s still did not see him as a dramatic actor.
The concerns proved unfounded, as Pitt’s swooning take fit the melodramatic tone that Zwick brought to the script by Susan Shilliday and William D. Wittliff. However, Hopkins does bring some much-needed levity to the proceedings, breaking the self-seriousness with his almost hammy interpretation of patriarch Colonel Ludlow.
24. The Road to Wellville (1994)
Hopkins infuses a bit of humor into even his most serious roles, but few parts let him go as big as he does for the comedy The Road to Wellville. Hopkins plays a cartoonish version of W.K. Kellogg, the real-world eccentric whose outlandish ideas about health led to the founding of the Kellogg’s cereal company.
Adapting the novel by T.C. Boyle, writer and director Alan Parker delights in the absurdities of Kellogg’s methods, and in the well-meaning buffoons who play along. As such, Parker lets Hopkins be as silly as possible. The results may not be good, per se, but no one can deny that they entertain.
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