The movie that made Anthony Hopkins feel like a fraud

The movie that made Anthony Hopkins feel like a fraud was 'The Lion in Winter,' which he starred in only a decade after leaving college.
The movie that made Anthony Hopkins feel like a fraud

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(Credits: TIFF)

Film » Cutting Room Floor

Thu 6 February 2025 14:45, UK

Few actors talk about their careers and the craft of acting with as much simultaneous awe and dismissiveness as Anthony Hopkins. The iconic star is one of the greatest actors to ever come out of Britain, yet also someone who doesn’t take acting seriously at all. He has repeatedly told interviewers that he had no great plan to be an actor, instead happening upon it as a teenager almost as a last resort. Indeed, the never-ending ascendancy in the theatre and film worlds he has experienced since has often left him experiencing imposter syndrome. One movie in his career made him feel particularly like a fraud, though – because he has no idea how he landed the role so quickly.

Growing up in a working-class family in Port Talbot, Wales, acting couldn’t have been further from Hopkins’ mind. As a child, he didn’t excel in school, and his worried parents insisted he attend Jones’ West Monmouth Boys’ School in Pontypool in the hopes it would instill discipline. Naturally, it didn’t really work, with Hopkins being more interested in artistic pursuits like drawing, painting, and playing the piano than focussing on his schoolwork.

Like many children whose interests lie outside the curriculum, Hopkins received poor grades, and this only reinforced the idea that he wasn’t intelligent. “I was a poor learner, which left me open to ridicule and gave me an inferiority complex,” he once told The New York Times. “I grew up absolutely convinced I was stupid.”

At a loose end, Hopkins’ parents switched him to a boarding school in Glamorgan – where the Headmaster dubbed him “hopeless” and condemned his “sheer contempt for authority.” It was only at the age of 17 that Hopkins discovered acting in a local YMCA, and finally found an outlet for his talents. “I had no idea I was going to be an actor,” a disbelieving Hopkins told The Sunday Times in 2024. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. Rob banks?” He added, “I had no hope for the future, and then I fell into this crazy business through chance — one microscopic chance.”

At 18, Hopkins auditioned for the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama by reading a scene from Othello, the only Shakespeare play he knew. To his eternal shock, he was granted a scholarship, and his life’s path was set. “I can’t explain that,” he admitted, still bewildered to this day. “I look back at my life and think, ‘Maybe I’m a conman?’“

The next decade saw Hopkins consistently climb higher in acting. Success and praise, which had previously been so hard to attain in school, now seemed to come to him without trying particularly hard. He graduated from college in 1957 and did his National Service between 1958 and 1960, yet still managed to make his professional stage debut that very year.

By 1965, Sir Laurence Olivier spotted him and invited him to join the Royal National Theatre in London, where he became the legendary star’s understudy. By 1967, only a decade after leaving college, he was starring alongside Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole in The Lion in Winter. He played Richard the Lionheart – a role for which he was nominated for a BAFTA. “How that happened, I don’t know,” Hopkins confessed. “No idea. None of it makes any sense to me, and therefore, I can’t take credit for any of it.”

If anything, starring in The Lion in Winter at such a young age made him feel like a fraud as much as it excited and fulfilled him. Sadly, in the ’70s, this feeling festered and became part of the reason Hopkins turned to alcohol. “Booze is a wonderful way of checking out,” he once confessed. “I felt deeply guilty and ashamed and not worthy of the luck I’d had as an actor.”

Ultimately, Hopkins got sober in 1975 and hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since. He reconciled feeling like a fraud and lady luck shining on him in his chosen profession by agreeing to listen to the voice in his head that urged him, “OK, fasten your seatbelt”—and listening to that voice gave him “a most phenomenal life.”

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