Anthony Hopkins was born on New Year's Eve 1937 in Margam, Glamorgan, a suburb of Port Talbot.¹⁾

His parents are baker Richard Arthur Hopkins and Annie Muriel Hopkins.²⁾

His school days were fruitless; he preferred to spend his time doing art, such as painting and drawing, or playing the piano, rather than studying.³⁾

To encourage discipline, his parents forced him to attend Jones' West Monmouth Boys' School in Pontypool in 1949. He stayed for five terms before moving on to Cowbridge Grammar School in the Vale of Glamorgan.⁴⁾

Welsh compatriot Richard Burton, whom Anthony Hopkins met at the age of 15, mentored and supported him.⁵⁾

Anthony Hopkins enrolled immediately in the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, where he graduated in 1957.⁶⁾

He traveled to London after two years of national service in the British Army, where he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.⁷⁾

Anthony Hopkins made his professional theatrical debut in 1960 with Swansea Little Theatre's performance of Have a Cigarette at the Palace Theatre in Swansea.⁸⁾

Laurence Olivier saw him after several years in repertory and persuaded him to join the Royal National Theatre in London in 1965.⁹⁾

Anthony Hopkins took over as Olivier's understudy after the actor got unwell with appendicitis during a performance of August Strindberg's The Dance of Death.¹⁰⁾

“A fresh young actor in the company of extraordinary potential named Anthony Hopkins was understudying me and went away with the part of Edgar like a cat with a mouse between its jaws,” Olivier later wrote in his memoir, Confessions of an Actor.¹¹⁾

Despite his success at the National, Hopkins grew weary of playing the same characters night after night and longed to appear in films. In a 1967 BBC broadcast of A Flea in Her Ear, he made his small-screen debut. Changes, a short directed by Drewe Henley, written and produced by James Scott, and co-starring Jacqueline Pearce, was his first film leading role.¹²⁾

Although Hopkins continued to work in theatre, he gradually moved away from it to become more established as a television and film actor.¹³⁾

In 1970, he played Charles Dickens in the BBC television film The Great Inimitable Mr. Dickens, and in the BBC miniseries War and Peace, he played Pierre Bezukhov (1972).¹⁴⁾