Anthony Hopkins

Born in Wales on 31 December 1937, Hopkins trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and RADA before Laurence Olivier spotted him and brought him into the Royal National Theatre in 1965, where he took on King Lear, Coriolanus, and Macbeth. Early film work — The Lion in Winter in 1968, The Elephant Man in 1980 — built the foundation, but 1991's The Silence of the Lambs made him inescapable: Hannibal Lecter won him his first Academy Award and became a cultural fixture. The next three decades brought four more Oscar nominations andework that ranged from the stiff heartbreak of The Remai…