Post-Lecter, Anthony Hopkins Takes Risks

Anthony Hopkins doesn't really have to account for his 40 years of success. It's enough that he has dazzled audiences in scores of films. But now he is taking on some roles he never expected to play: not just actor, but also writer, director and composer, of a new movie called "Slipstream."

"My friend Shelly, she says you go through past lives, incarnations, and you get in touch with everything that makes you do things in this life, like, say you were an addict or nuts or something, like you have fear of elevators and spiders and snakes and stuff, like clowns and opera singers and freaky stuff," he told Sunday Morning correspondent Rita Braver. "Well, it all comes up through past life aggression and you get pulled back into what she calls the slipstream."

With a stellar cast including John Turturo and Christian Slater, "Slipstream" is a kaleidoscopic film with fantasy and reality intermingled.

"In a way, the man I play is a screenplay writer, Felix Bonhoefer. It's not a standard part. He's an observer of these people around him and it is very much my take on the world," Hopkins said. "And in that sense it's autobiographical. Because he's a man who's really in his shell, never comes out of his shell. Nobody can reach him - his own wife can't reach him."

But that's no longer true of Hopkins. He says he has settled down and finally realizes that he has accomplishes everything he set out to do.

"I've had a wonderful career, and I started getting bored with it as an actor and I did this as an act of light rebellion," he said.

At almost 70 years old, Anthony Hopkins is entitled to a little light rebellion. He grew up in Wales the son of a baker, and knew as a little boy that he wanted to be famous.

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Photos: 2007 Fall Film Preview

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His father needn't have worried. Hopkins got a scholarship to study acting and music, and in 1965 was accepted at the prestigious Royal National Theatre in London, with Sir Lawrence Olivier at his mentor.

"He really liked me," Hopkins said. "But I was a bad boy in those days. I was badly behaved. I drank a lot, and I got in a lot of trouble. And he said, 'You know, you want to kill yourself. Go ahead, but you can't do it if you want to survive, you have to be really strong.'"

But Hopkins kept drinking and in 1968 he made his first film, playing Richard I in "The Lion in Winter" with Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn. He and O'Toole became drinking buddies.

"So we both drank a little too much," Hopkins said. "We both know how to take a sherry before dinner, but he was a great character, charismatic, genius I think. And Hepburn she was the sort of den mother. She didn't like drinkers. She said, 'My God, if I smell booze on your breath, I'm going back home because I hate it. Drunks, I've known them all: Bogart and Spencer Tracy.' But she liked us all, you know. She said, 'You're drinking that? My God, you're going to die.' She was a busy body. But years later when I stopped I phoned her. I saw her one day. I said I stopped drinking. She said, 'Thank God for that. You're a fool.'"

It was in California where he moved to pursue his film career, that he knew he had to stop.

"I was dying," he said. "I was really lonely and there's a little tap on the head, saying, 'You want to die? What do you want to do?' I thought. So that's what I did: I stopped."

He concentrated on work, doing lots of TV and film and even some theater. But his career was a bit stalled when out of the blue he got offered a part in a film called "The Silence of the Lambs."

Before he read the script he thought it was a children's story and was surprised to find it to be a chilling tale of a cannibalistic psychiatrist, Hannibal Lecter. The character Hopkins created was later dubbed the greatest movie villain ever by the American Film Institute.

Hopkins won an Oscar for the role and got several more nominations: for playing John Quincy Adams in "Amistad," Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone's "Nixon," and a repressed butler in "The Remains of the Day." As usual, he downplays his acclaimed performance.

"People say, 'How do you play him?' I say, 'Well, I don't move much and speak quietly,'" Hopkins said. "So people put into their imagination that they're impressed, you know?"

But he says his all-time favorite character is Burt Munro, the aging motorcycle rider in "The World's Fastest Indian." Munro said that danger is the spice of life and you have to take risks. Hopkins seems to have embraced that philosophy and recently took up painting. He's already had several shows, giving the sales money to charity.

"Because I do it all for fun," Hopkins said. "I'll come in the door with all kinds of colors, dark blues, reds, greens and purples and just pour it on and sometimes in liquid form and then make a mess of it. It's like painting with kids, you know - you daub it on and stand back."

And he took another risk: Using music he composed in his new film.

Hopkins credits much of his current happy state to his wife of 4 years, Stella Arroyave, who plays his wife in "Slipstream."

"She encouraged me to do things that I've never dreamed of doing before," he said. "She's a pretty strong woman, she's very feminine, very beautiful. And she has changed everything in my life."

In the past Hopkins has said he was not a very good husband. But that has changed.

"I was just thoughtless," he said. "Human beings, none of us are perfect. Can't be saints. We make our mistakes and I made mine. Over, done, past, closed, through the next door."

Hopkins has gone through many doors. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1993 and in 2000, Hopkins decided to become an American citizen.

"I love it here, it's so liberating and beautiful," he said.

Today, Hopkins says he still marvels at what he has achieved as he looks out over his expansive career.

"I just wanted to live more and broaden my horizons," he said. "I've got a bigger life. I don't mean it's about money or success. It has nothing to do with that. It's just to have a more full life."