His parents were the late Richard Arthur Hopkins and Muriel Yeats, a distant relation of poet William Butler Yeats. He was influenced and encouraged to become an actor by fellow Welshman Richard Burton, whom he met briefly at the age of fifteen. Hopkins eventually moved to London where he trained as an actor at RADA, at the suggestion of Roy Marsden.

His most famous role was the portrayal of the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in the film The Silence of the Lambs
(for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor) opposite Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, who also won the Academy Award for Best Actress that year. In fact the film won the Academy Award for Best Picture as well that year, no doubt due to the electrifying interplay between Hopkins and Foster. It is the shortest lead acting Oscar-winning performance ever, as Hopkins is only on the screen for about sixteen minutes. Hopkins reprised the role of Dr. Lecter twice in Hannibal
and Red Dragon. (Lecter first appears in the film Manhunter, in which the role was played by Brian Cox).

Red Dragon was a remake of Manhunter, which allowed Hopkins to play Lecter in adaptations of all three Lecter novels. Lecter's slurping sound from Silence of the Lambs was apparently improvised; although, Hopkins admits during the Criterion Laserdisc commentary track it may have been influenced by Bela Lugosi (with no remembrance which movie it would be from). All three films were based on the bestselling novels by Thomas Harris, who reportedly was very pleased with Hopkins' portrayal of Lecter.

Hopkins has also been Oscar-nominated for The Remains of the Day (1993), which was based on the award-winning novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Other Oscar-nominated performances include Nixon (1995) and Amistad (1997). He also won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor for his perfomances in The Silence of the Lambs and The Remains of the Day.

He has played many famous historical and fictional characters including:

John Quincy Adams (Amistad 1997), William Bligh (The Bounty 1984), Charles Dickens (The Great Inimitable Mr. Dickens 1970), John Frost (A Bridge Too Far 1977), Abraham Van Helsing (Bram Stoker's Dracula
1992), Adolf Hitler (The Bunker 1981), C. S. Lewis, (Shadowlands
1993)David Lloyd George (Young Winston 1972), Richard Nixon (Nixon 1995), Othello (Othello 1981), Pablo Picasso (Surviving Picasso 1996), Quasimodo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame
1982), Yitzak Rabin (Victory at Entebbe 1976), Richard Lionheart (The Lion in Winter
1968), Titus Andronicus (Titus 1999), and Zorro (The Mask of Zorro 1998).

He was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1987, and a Knight of the British Empire (KBE)in 1993. (Being a higher award within the same order, only the postnominal KBE is used.)

Today, Hopkins also takes time to support various philanthropic groups. Hopkins was past Gala Fundraiser Guest of Honour for Women in Recovery, Inc., a Venice, California-based non-profit organization offering rehabilitation for women in need. He is also a volunteer teacher at the Ruskins School of Acting in Santa Monica, California where he also resides.

[Source: Wikipedia]