The year was 1967, and Peter O'Toole was preparing to co-star with Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter. One night in London, after a production of Chekhov's Three Sisters, O'Toole knocked on the dressing-room door of the young actor playing the brother. "O'Toole was standing there, two sheets to the wind, as they say," recalls the actor. "He said, 'Would you like to be in a film?'"
Ever since he was a boy poring over issues of Look magazine with ads for shiny Buicks and Chryslers, ever since American G.I.s camped out in his childhood home in South Wales, providing chewing gum during the austere war years, the actor had dreamed of the U.S. The movies, he now knew, would be his ticket there; as an adult, as an actor, he had been influenced less by the titans of the British theater than by the naturalistic style of Marlon Brando and James Dean. Did he want to be in a film? Yes.
Never mind that when Anthony Hopkins went to audition for O'Toole the next day, the now sober actor didn't have a clue why he was there. Hopkins got the part, though, and since his debut as the petulant young Richard the Lion-Hearted in The Lion in Winter, he has turned out nearly 100 finely tuned performances for screens both big and small, including the egotistical artist of Surviving Picasso; the tragically flawed Commander in Chief of Nixon; the withdrawn butler in The Remains of the Day.
But there is only one role with which Hopkins, now 63, has haunted us: Hannibal the Cannibal--the very, very bad doctor with a taste for Chianti, fava beans and internal human organs--in 1991's The Silence of the Lambs. The critically acclaimed thriller not only salvaged Hopkins' lagging movie career, it also catapulted him from character actor to bona fide movie star. The movie won five Oscars--including Best Actor (Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster) and Best Picture--and took a huge bite out of the box office. A decade later, the slickly subdued, eerily serene Dr. Hannibal Lecter still inhabits our nightmares because Hopkins knows that as an actor, "the quieter you are, the more terrifying it is."
Time passes. Things change. The doctor is back, meaner--and louder--than ever. Next month the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs will arrive in theaters on a torrent of hype and with great expectations. While Hopkins had only a few indelible scenes in Silence, in Hannibal he is front and center in the title role. The image of the red-eyed devil glowers on billboards all over the world. And the box-office well-being of the $80 million sequel depends almost entirely on audiences' fascination with Hopkins' character. The movie itself? You will love it or hate it, and you will never eat off someone else's plate again.
The man at the center of all this hoopla seems not to give a hoot about its reception. Or at least he is trying to appear not to. Hopkins can be a volatile guy, but he usually keeps his temper under control. "It's a bit of a gamble doing a sequel," he says, making the understatement one morning as he sits at the kitchen table in his Pacific Palisades, Calif., home with eclectic art on the walls and a sprawling view of the ocean. "I don't want to think about it. I learn my lines, show up, make sure the check's in the mail."