In the late 1970s, Hopkins began work on The Elephant Man in London, playing Dr. Frederick Treves opposite John Hurt’s John Merrick. Director David Lynch shot in atmospheric black-and-white amid crumbling Victorian docks. During a scene in which Treves searched for Merrick in a dark cellar, Hopkins stumbled on a step. The shock triggered childhood terrors, and he found himself chanting the 23rd Psalm while a genuine tear fell. Lynch kept it in the film.

The production broke for Christmas 1979. Hopkins and his wife, Jenni, drove to Wales to stay with his parents at the Ship Inn. On Christmas morning, Hopkins’s father, Dick, had a heart attack while entertaining neighbors. A doctor declared the next 24 hours critical and ordered complete bed rest. Dick wanted to get up immediately. The doctor privately told Hopkins that Dick’s enlarged heart, damaged by decades of hard work, smoking, and drinking, would kill him—it was only a matter of time. Hopkins returned to London to complete filming, as his father seemed to recover.

Dick survived another year, but his decline was terrible. In his final months, he grew distant and muttered fragments of scripture despite lifelong atheism. A hospital matron warned Hopkins that his father was dying, though his mother refused to believe it. On one of his last days, Dick asked Hopkins to recite Hamlet. On March 30, 1981, Hopkins was called to the hospital and was told upon arrival that his father had died. At the hospital, Hopkins touched his father’s cold foot and felt emotionally empty. At the funeral, his mother inscribed Dick’s favorite passage from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám in a cherished book. She told Hopkins that Dick was a good but insecure man who never recognized his own worth.

In the early 1980s, playwright David Hare sent Hopkins the script for Pravda, a satire about tabloid culture. Hopkins was captivated by Lambert Le Roux, an unscrupulous South African media mogul. His mind already made up, Hopkins suggested adding a line about Le Roux owning 1,000 unread books, which Hare incorporated. Hopkins viewed Le Roux not as a monster but as a hypnotically certain figure whose appeal lay in his willingness to say what others feared to think. The role marked Hopkins’s return to the National Theatre despite his past bad behavior there.

Other stage and film work followed: Antony and Cleopatra with Judi Dench, Great Expectations (playing Magwitch), Othello, and The Bunker. When Richard Burton died in 1984 at age 58 of alcohol-related causes, Hopkins visited Elizabeth Taylor at her Bel Air home. Despite serious back problems and being on painkillers, Taylor defended Burton’s career.

While filming Mussolini and I in Rome, Hopkins experienced a revelation. Sitting in a garden above the Spanish Steps, he realized he had been ungrateful despite his good fortune. A personal mantra came to him about not caring what others thought, doing things for enjoyment, and recognizing that life had no big deals. He repeated this daily for years.

In the mid-1980s, Hopkins filmed 84 Charing Cross Road in London. One afternoon, a taxi driver philosophized about mortality and the transience of life, reminding Hopkins of first hearing about death as a child. After quoting Shakespeare on death and making the driver laugh, Hopkins reflected on how much he had changed.

In September 1989, nearing the end of an eight-month run in M. Butterfly, Hopkins was bored with theater work. His London agent, Dick Blodgett, called about a film script called The Silence of the Lambs. Hopkins stopped reading at page 15 and told his agent not to send more unless there was a firm offer—the role of Hannibal Lecter was the best he had ever read. Director Jonathan Demme confirmed interest, flew to London, and took Hopkins to dinner. Hopkins explained that he would play Lecter like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey—quiet, intimate, and devoid of emotion.

Hopkins met the production team in New York. Though some were nervous about hiring a Welsh actor for an American serial killer, Demme insisted that Hopkins was perfect. Hopkins knew instinctively to play Lecter as simultaneously remote and alert, like a spider he once encountered in his father’s bakery. He asked to be shown standing calmly as Agent Clarice Starling first approached his cell, explaining that Lecter would sense her coming down the corridor.

At the table read, Hopkins frightened actor Jodie Foster, who later said she remained somewhat afraid throughout filming. Hopkins drew on multiple inspirations: Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Stalin’s terrifying stillness, and his RADA teacher Christopher Fettes’s penetrating perceptiveness and crisp speech. The film was shot in Pennsylvania, and Hopkins was largely isolated in his glass cell between takes.

On their last day, Hopkins and Foster finally relaxed over lunch, admitting mutual fear during production. Years later, his former RADA teachers, Christopher Fettes and Yat Malmgren, took him out to dinner. They praised his performance, and Hopkins revealed that he had based Lecter partly on Fettes’s knifelike, hypercritical precision. Fettes was delighted to have inspired an iconic monster.

Hopkins recalled seeing Chaplin’s Limelight in 1952 as a boy. The film’s themes of aging, loneliness, and resilience touched him deeply. He had watched it repeatedly and wrote Chaplin a fan letter; Chaplin had sent a polite typed reply. His father had bought him a projector to screen Chaplin’s films at home.

Forty years later, while filming the 1992 biopic Chaplin with Robert Downey Jr., Hopkins visited Chaplin’s Swiss home at the invitation of Chaplin’s daughter, Geraldine. Sitting at Chaplin’s piano, Hopkins felt he had dreamed his life into existence. That same day, director Richard Attenborough told him that he had been nominated for an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs.

Hopkins tried to avoid the Oscar ceremony, feeling anxious about such events, but his agent insisted that he attend. At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a woman told Hopkins he would win. After Jodie Foster won Best Actress, Kathy Bates announced Hopkins as Best Actor. (The film ultimately swept the Big Five categories, the first horror film to win Best Picture.) Onstage, Hopkins mentioned that his father had died 11 years earlier that night. Backstage, he called his mother in Wales at four o’clock in the morning. She reminded him of his roots on Wern Road in Port Talbot, and he replied that he did okay. He realized that he had beaten his anxiety.