PremiumNEW DELHI: Although most cinemas across India aren’t functional due to curbs in the wake of a ferocious second wave of the coronavirus pandemic, movie buffs can catch, wherever possible, actor Anthony Hopkins’ latest Oscar winner The Father that was released in the theatres last Friday. The 83-year old actor became the oldest winner of the Academy Award for the best actor award this week.
A French-British co-production, The Father stars Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots, Rufus Sewell, and Olivia Williams besides Hopkins and follows an ageing man who must deal with his progressing memory loss.
Having made his first professional stage appearance in the Palace Theatre, Swansea, in 1960, Hopkins’ first starring role in a film came in 1964 in Changes, a short directed by Drewe Henley, written and produced by James Scott. A breakthrough role in The Lion in Winter playing Richard the Lionheart, a performance which saw him nominated for the BAFTA Award for best actor in a supporting role was followed by his performance as British politician David Lloyd George in Young Winston in 1972, and as British Army officer John Frost in the World War II-set film A Bridge Too Far in 1977, both directed by Richard Attenborough.
He won great acclaim among critics and audiences as the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, for which he received his first Academy Award for best actor in 1991. Other successes in the 1990s included Howards End, a Merchant-Ivory period film based on the E. M. Forster novel, and The Remains of the Day (1993), a film set in 1950s post-war Britain based on the acclaimed novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.
His more recent performances include those in the HBO science-fiction series Westworld, as Lear in the 2018 television film King Lear alongside Emma Thompson, and as Pope Benedict XVI in Fernando Meirelles' The Two Popes.
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