Believes in God and said "being an atheist must be like living in a closed cell with no windows”
WIKIPEDIA:
"...Philip Anthony Hopkins, CBE (born 31 December 1937) is a Welsh actor of film, stage, and television, and a composer and painter. After graduating from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in 1957, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and was then spotted by Laurence Olivier who invited him to join the Royal National Theatre. In 1968, he got his break in film in The Lion in Winter, playing Richard I."
"Hopkins is a recovering alcoholic; he stopped drinking on 25 December 1975.[35][36] He said that a major help in his recovery was his belief in God.[37] He has criticised atheism, saying "being an atheist must be like living in a closed cell with no windows”.[38] He quit smoking using the Allen Carr method.[39]
In 2008, he embarked on a weight loss programme, and by 2010, he had lost 80 pounds.[40]"
Anthony Hopkins' wife saved him from 'depression'
The British actor married Colombian born antiques dealer Stella
Arroyave in 2003 and he revealed meeting her was the best thing that
ever happened to him as he now thinks he was suffering from "slight
depression" at that point in his life.
He explained: "She met me ten years ago when I was shut down. Shut down for some years. I didn't feel shut down at that time. I felt I was quite happy. But I was dealing with slight depression. Not trusting anyone. Certainly not trusting women.
"Everyday she wakes up happy. She's very positive about everything. I learnt from her just to take life as it comes. So I live my life in non -expectation."
Anthony credits 54-year-old Stella's easy going nature with helping him to deal with the difficulties of fame and he now doesn't care what people think of him.
He told Seven magazine: "My philosophy is: It's none of my business what people say of me and think of me. I am what I am and I do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier."
Along with a brief brush with depression, Anthony, 73, also had a tendency to drink too much alcohol in his youth but he soon decided it wasn't for him.
He said: "When I first came to LA in the seventies I was drinking up a storm. Everyone else was doing drugs but I just thought: 'This is it. No more booze'. I'd had a couple of warnings. People told me: 'You've got a nice career ahead of you, you should clean yourself up.' But I didn't do it for the work, I did it for me."
He flips it open to display what’s on the screen: a black and white photo of a solemn-faced little boy. ‘That’s me’, he says proudly. ‘I was ten years old, just a baby then. I carry it everywhere and whenever I see it, I say to my picture: “We did OK, didn’t we kid?” ’
That’s something of an understatement. Revered on stage and renowned on screen, he has won three Bafta awards, two Emmys, and an Oscar along with the knighthood he received in 1993.
He is happily married to 57-year-old Colombian-born beauty Stella Arroyave and lives in Malibu where he paints, plays the piano, and walks on the beach. ‘I have a nice life,’ he says. ‘I am happy, whatever that means.’
The picture he carries on his phone is there to remind him of just what he has achieved. ‘I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.
‘I was pathetic at school in Port Talbot. I don’t know if it was dyslexia or Attention Deficit Disorder, or just me being a problem child, but I sat in the back of the classroom and didn’t know what any of the teachers were talking about — I was bottom of the class at everything. And I was made to suffer.
‘But in a way that was a great gift that life gave me, because in the end I was so angry and enraged that I made a certain choice in life. I thought: “I will get my revenge, I will become rich and famous and that will show them.”
‘One day in 1947 I found myself in an amateur dramatics class at the local YMCA. I thought to myself: “What the hell am I doing here?” I had no interest in acting, no idea of what I was going to do in life, except probably follow my dad into his bakery.
‘But I tried acting, liked it, and stuck with it. I saw it as the way I would keep that promise to myself of getting back at those who had made my school life a misery. There are times when I wondered if I ever would, though.
‘I have had three marriages and various set backs. Then there’s my bout with booze, which damn near killed me. But I came through all that, and this picture’ — he smiles as he waves the phone at me — ‘is a testament to the journey.
‘We did OK, didn’t we kid — and that’ll be the title of my memoirs if ever I get around to writing them’.
Sir Anthony (‘Oh, just call me Tony — please’) is a tall, affable 75-year-old, ambling into the hotel room where we meet, silver hair swept back from his face, a dark blue jacket over a light blue shirt matching those extraordinary cobalt eyes.
His new film, Red 2, the sequel to the 2010 comedy action hit Red, in which he plays a mad bomb inventor, opens on August 2 and he has been touring with some of his co-stars.
‘Have you seen Helen Mirren?’ he whispers as the feisty theatrical Dame shimmies past clad in a fuchsia-coloured dress with nosebleed high heels. ‘Wow.’
If his school life had been miserable, his home life was rather less so — perhaps the word to describe it is stern.
‘My father wasn’t a cruel man,’ he says now carefully. ‘And I loved him. But he was a pretty tough character. His own father was even tougher — one of those Victorians, hard as iron — but my dad was tough enough.
‘He was very frustrated in life, I think, he was a great storyteller and could have been an actor. But he was very disappointed in me. He used to ask me to help in the bakery and I was no good at it. Once he asked me to take some cakes into the shop and I left them on the kitchen table and went upstairs to play the piano.
‘So he came up to the room where I was — I can still see him, with the flour dust in his hair and on his arms — and said: “What’s that you’re playing?” I said: “Beethoven.” He said: “You know he went deaf, don’t you!”
‘One day he asked me if I wanted to become a baker like him. I said no. He said: “Thank God for that, ’cause you wouldn’t be able to do it!” ’
Luckily, inspiration was quite literally on his doorstep in the form of his famous neighbour Richard Burton. ‘I remember it was in 1955 and I was helping my father with the bakery. I walked into this shop to deliver some bread, and as I came out, a grey car pulled up to make a turn to the main road, and it was him, it was Richard Burton. He’d just become a Hollywood star, and was a hero in South Wales as the local boy who made movies.
‘And he looked at me, just glanced casually, and I looked back at him and our eyes met and I thought: “One day, I want to be like that.” ’
Ten years later, he was working with Sir Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre. ‘My parents had become a little more proud of me by then. My mother and father came to see me in this play, and I introduced them to Olivier, and my mother went a very funny colour, she was so nervous to meet him.
‘My father said: “How old are you?”
‘Olivier said: “I was born in 1907.”
My father said: “Same age as me, then — both going down the hill now, aren’t we?” My mother said to him afterwards: “That was Sir Laurence Olivier.” Dad said: “So what? He breathes oxygen just like me, doesn’t he?”
‘Twenty years later, I was in New York doing a play called Equus and at the end of the show one night there was a knock on my door and the stage manager brought Richard’s [first] wife, Sybil with Lauren Bacall and a couple of other people into my dressing room. And a year after that I went to the same theatre to visit Richard Burton himself in the same play. So it all comes full circle in the end.’
Actors from the hard-drinking era, both he and Burton experienced their struggles with alcohol. The difference between the two men is that Anthony was able to get out before it killed him.
‘When I used to drink like a fish I smoked my lungs out, too. I used to go out with my father and we’d both drink quite heavily. And there was a man at the pub we used to go to who was very clean-living, he smoked one cigarette a week, drank one glass of beer a week, and that was it, and one day he dropped dead — just like that — because of a brain haemorrhage.
‘My father said to me: “Well, there you go. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke and — bam! — he’s gone. So let’s drink up and be merry.” But you have a certain choice in life. You come to a certain age, you think: “Well, I don’t think this is too smart to feed the fuel tank with all this junk, so I better slow down or stop.” ’ He has never disclosed exactly what it was that made him stop drinking just two days before his 38th birthday.
But whatever it was, he has not touched alcohol since. ‘I just thought, “Well, I have a choice here. Change or die. Grow or go.”
So I stopped doing certain things and I started doing certain others, and I’m glad I did. I see other people still carrying this monkey on their back, which is exactly what it is.’
He is on his third marriage and makes it clear that for him, the third time is the one. From 1966 to 1972 he was married to actress Petronella Barker, with whom he has a daughter, Abigail.
His next wife was pretty production assistant Jennifer Lynton, whom he married in 1973 and who saw him through his alcohol struggles but refused to move with him to Los Angeles, although they remained married in name until 2002.
‘I am not very good with relationships,’ he said when they finally divorced. ‘With anyone. I can’t be locked up with anyone for too long.’ That was before Stella Arroyave came along.
Stella is now billed as an actress and film producer — however, she was an antiques dealer when Anthony happened to walk into her shop about 12 years ago to look around. As he recalls it, she danced, rather than walked, to greet him . . . and danced straight into his heart while she was about it.
‘She’s a wonderful woman who likes to spend money’ he says happily, ‘and even as I am sitting here talking to you, is out spending my money. It’s all gone, whoosh. But she’s very good for me, my wife, because she slows me down.
‘This morning I was sitting in a restaurant and I was leaning back in my chair jiggling away and she said: “Don’t do that.” I said: “Why?” She said: “Cause you could collapse!” She looks after me that way and she needs to, because my nature is to do things very fast because I have convinced myself that I am still 45 years old. I walk far too fast and I’m always falling over and she reminds me not to.’
Anthony says that when he’s not working they like to keep themselves to themselves.
‘We have people over for dinner sometimes and it’s pretty nice, but at the end of the meal, when you’ve said all you have to say, what do you do with them then? Stella does warn them. She says: “Tony’s very odd you know, he’ll get up and go to bed if he gets bored.”
But what are you supposed to do? You sit around and you sit around and at the end of it, you think: “What the hell are we doing?” And I never hang out with actors, they’re the worst, they’ve got nothing to talk about but old movies.
‘And yet they’re always saying: “Let’s have dinner.” Big thing that, on film sets: “Let’s get together, let’s have dinner.” Someone said that to Meryl Streep once and she said, “Why? I don’t even know you.” ’
He had a good time filming Red 2, he says. ‘Working with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Bruce Willis was wonderful. I’ve worked with Catherine before and about 20 years ago I went to see Die Hard and thought: “Oh, that Bruce Willis, he’s really great,” and now here I am working with him, too. And it still doesn’t make any sense to me how any of this happens because I’m still mystified by the process.’
All in all, he says, he has had a wonderful life. ‘OK, I look in the mirror and go: “You are getting older, buddy,” but that’s the way it is. I’m just happy to be alive, you know? Alive and still working. And I love going in to work.
'The process of going through the day, putting on some clothes and having make-up dabbed onto you and then you go and do some acting . . . well, it beats real work, doesn’t it?’
As for those long-gone days of bullying and confusion in Port Talbot, he says he doesn’t dwell on them, but simply used them to drive him to where he is today. ‘I’ve been back there and those who did all those things to me are now dead. But I’m still alive.’
He reaches into his pocket and once again brings out the bubblegum-coloured mobile phone with the photograph of his younger self.
‘That’s what I tell this little kid,’ he chuckles. ‘We did OK, kid, we did OK.’
He explained: "She met me ten years ago when I was shut down. Shut down for some years. I didn't feel shut down at that time. I felt I was quite happy. But I was dealing with slight depression. Not trusting anyone. Certainly not trusting women.
"Everyday she wakes up happy. She's very positive about everything. I learnt from her just to take life as it comes. So I live my life in non -expectation."
Anthony credits 54-year-old Stella's easy going nature with helping him to deal with the difficulties of fame and he now doesn't care what people think of him.
He told Seven magazine: "My philosophy is: It's none of my business what people say of me and think of me. I am what I am and I do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier."
Along with a brief brush with depression, Anthony, 73, also had a tendency to drink too much alcohol in his youth but he soon decided it wasn't for him.
He said: "When I first came to LA in the seventies I was drinking up a storm. Everyone else was doing drugs but I just thought: 'This is it. No more booze'. I'd had a couple of warnings. People told me: 'You've got a nice career ahead of you, you should clean yourself up.' But I didn't do it for the work, I did it for me."
My wife? She loves to spend my money: Sir Anthony Hopkins on the woman who helped put his wild ways behind him... at a cost
Sir Anthony Hopkins reaches deep into his pocket and pulls out a bubble-gum pink mobile phone.He flips it open to display what’s on the screen: a black and white photo of a solemn-faced little boy. ‘That’s me’, he says proudly. ‘I was ten years old, just a baby then. I carry it everywhere and whenever I see it, I say to my picture: “We did OK, didn’t we kid?” ’
That’s something of an understatement. Revered on stage and renowned on screen, he has won three Bafta awards, two Emmys, and an Oscar along with the knighthood he received in 1993.
He is happily married to 57-year-old Colombian-born beauty Stella Arroyave and lives in Malibu where he paints, plays the piano, and walks on the beach. ‘I have a nice life,’ he says. ‘I am happy, whatever that means.’
Glamorous: Sir Anthony Hopkins and wife Stella Arroyave
The picture he carries on his phone is there to remind him of just what he has achieved. ‘I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.
‘I was pathetic at school in Port Talbot. I don’t know if it was dyslexia or Attention Deficit Disorder, or just me being a problem child, but I sat in the back of the classroom and didn’t know what any of the teachers were talking about — I was bottom of the class at everything. And I was made to suffer.
‘But in a way that was a great gift that life gave me, because in the end I was so angry and enraged that I made a certain choice in life. I thought: “I will get my revenge, I will become rich and famous and that will show them.”
‘One day in 1947 I found myself in an amateur dramatics class at the local YMCA. I thought to myself: “What the hell am I doing here?” I had no interest in acting, no idea of what I was going to do in life, except probably follow my dad into his bakery.
‘But I tried acting, liked it, and stuck with it. I saw it as the way I would keep that promise to myself of getting back at those who had made my school life a misery. There are times when I wondered if I ever would, though.
‘I have had three marriages and various set backs. Then there’s my bout with booze, which damn near killed me. But I came through all that, and this picture’ — he smiles as he waves the phone at me — ‘is a testament to the journey.
Sweet: Sir Anthony Hopkins keeps this picture of himself at the age of ten on his phone to remind him of what he has achieved
Sir Anthony (‘Oh, just call me Tony — please’) is a tall, affable 75-year-old, ambling into the hotel room where we meet, silver hair swept back from his face, a dark blue jacket over a light blue shirt matching those extraordinary cobalt eyes.
His new film, Red 2, the sequel to the 2010 comedy action hit Red, in which he plays a mad bomb inventor, opens on August 2 and he has been touring with some of his co-stars.
‘Have you seen Helen Mirren?’ he whispers as the feisty theatrical Dame shimmies past clad in a fuchsia-coloured dress with nosebleed high heels. ‘Wow.’
If his school life had been miserable, his home life was rather less so — perhaps the word to describe it is stern.
‘My father wasn’t a cruel man,’ he says now carefully. ‘And I loved him. But he was a pretty tough character. His own father was even tougher — one of those Victorians, hard as iron — but my dad was tough enough.
‘He was very frustrated in life, I think, he was a great storyteller and could have been an actor. But he was very disappointed in me. He used to ask me to help in the bakery and I was no good at it. Once he asked me to take some cakes into the shop and I left them on the kitchen table and went upstairs to play the piano.
‘So he came up to the room where I was — I can still see him, with the flour dust in his hair and on his arms — and said: “What’s that you’re playing?” I said: “Beethoven.” He said: “You know he went deaf, don’t you!”
‘One day he asked me if I wanted to become a baker like him. I said no. He said: “Thank God for that, ’cause you wouldn’t be able to do it!” ’
Luckily, inspiration was quite literally on his doorstep in the form of his famous neighbour Richard Burton. ‘I remember it was in 1955 and I was helping my father with the bakery. I walked into this shop to deliver some bread, and as I came out, a grey car pulled up to make a turn to the main road, and it was him, it was Richard Burton. He’d just become a Hollywood star, and was a hero in South Wales as the local boy who made movies.
‘And he looked at me, just glanced casually, and I looked back at him and our eyes met and I thought: “One day, I want to be like that.” ’
Ten years later, he was working with Sir Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre. ‘My parents had become a little more proud of me by then. My mother and father came to see me in this play, and I introduced them to Olivier, and my mother went a very funny colour, she was so nervous to meet him.
‘My father said: “How old are you?”
‘Olivier said: “I was born in 1907.”
My father said: “Same age as me, then — both going down the hill now, aren’t we?” My mother said to him afterwards: “That was Sir Laurence Olivier.” Dad said: “So what? He breathes oxygen just like me, doesn’t he?”
‘Twenty years later, I was in New York doing a play called Equus and at the end of the show one night there was a knock on my door and the stage manager brought Richard’s [first] wife, Sybil with Lauren Bacall and a couple of other people into my dressing room. And a year after that I went to the same theatre to visit Richard Burton himself in the same play. So it all comes full circle in the end.’
Cast: Hopkins' new film Red 2 also stars Dame Helen Mirren, Bruce Willis and Mary-Louise Parker
Actors from the hard-drinking era, both he and Burton experienced their struggles with alcohol. The difference between the two men is that Anthony was able to get out before it killed him.
‘When I used to drink like a fish I smoked my lungs out, too. I used to go out with my father and we’d both drink quite heavily. And there was a man at the pub we used to go to who was very clean-living, he smoked one cigarette a week, drank one glass of beer a week, and that was it, and one day he dropped dead — just like that — because of a brain haemorrhage.
‘My father said to me: “Well, there you go. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke and — bam! — he’s gone. So let’s drink up and be merry.” But you have a certain choice in life. You come to a certain age, you think: “Well, I don’t think this is too smart to feed the fuel tank with all this junk, so I better slow down or stop.” ’ He has never disclosed exactly what it was that made him stop drinking just two days before his 38th birthday.
But whatever it was, he has not touched alcohol since. ‘I just thought, “Well, I have a choice here. Change or die. Grow or go.”
So I stopped doing certain things and I started doing certain others, and I’m glad I did. I see other people still carrying this monkey on their back, which is exactly what it is.’
He is on his third marriage and makes it clear that for him, the third time is the one. From 1966 to 1972 he was married to actress Petronella Barker, with whom he has a daughter, Abigail.
His next wife was pretty production assistant Jennifer Lynton, whom he married in 1973 and who saw him through his alcohol struggles but refused to move with him to Los Angeles, although they remained married in name until 2002.
‘I am not very good with relationships,’ he said when they finally divorced. ‘With anyone. I can’t be locked up with anyone for too long.’ That was before Stella Arroyave came along.
Hit: Anthony Hopkins as Dr Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs
Stella is now billed as an actress and film producer — however, she was an antiques dealer when Anthony happened to walk into her shop about 12 years ago to look around. As he recalls it, she danced, rather than walked, to greet him . . . and danced straight into his heart while she was about it.
‘She’s a wonderful woman who likes to spend money’ he says happily, ‘and even as I am sitting here talking to you, is out spending my money. It’s all gone, whoosh. But she’s very good for me, my wife, because she slows me down.
‘This morning I was sitting in a restaurant and I was leaning back in my chair jiggling away and she said: “Don’t do that.” I said: “Why?” She said: “Cause you could collapse!” She looks after me that way and she needs to, because my nature is to do things very fast because I have convinced myself that I am still 45 years old. I walk far too fast and I’m always falling over and she reminds me not to.’
Anthony says that when he’s not working they like to keep themselves to themselves.
‘We have people over for dinner sometimes and it’s pretty nice, but at the end of the meal, when you’ve said all you have to say, what do you do with them then? Stella does warn them. She says: “Tony’s very odd you know, he’ll get up and go to bed if he gets bored.”
But what are you supposed to do? You sit around and you sit around and at the end of it, you think: “What the hell are we doing?” And I never hang out with actors, they’re the worst, they’ve got nothing to talk about but old movies.
‘And yet they’re always saying: “Let’s have dinner.” Big thing that, on film sets: “Let’s get together, let’s have dinner.” Someone said that to Meryl Streep once and she said, “Why? I don’t even know you.” ’
He had a good time filming Red 2, he says. ‘Working with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Bruce Willis was wonderful. I’ve worked with Catherine before and about 20 years ago I went to see Die Hard and thought: “Oh, that Bruce Willis, he’s really great,” and now here I am working with him, too. And it still doesn’t make any sense to me how any of this happens because I’m still mystified by the process.’
All in all, he says, he has had a wonderful life. ‘OK, I look in the mirror and go: “You are getting older, buddy,” but that’s the way it is. I’m just happy to be alive, you know? Alive and still working. And I love going in to work.
'The process of going through the day, putting on some clothes and having make-up dabbed onto you and then you go and do some acting . . . well, it beats real work, doesn’t it?’
As for those long-gone days of bullying and confusion in Port Talbot, he says he doesn’t dwell on them, but simply used them to drive him to where he is today. ‘I’ve been back there and those who did all those things to me are now dead. But I’m still alive.’
He reaches into his pocket and once again brings out the bubblegum-coloured mobile phone with the photograph of his younger self.
‘That’s what I tell this little kid,’ he chuckles. ‘We did OK, kid, we did OK.’
- Red 2 opens in cinemas on August 2.
Stella Arroyave- Anthony Hopkins’ Wife (PHOTOS)
The great Anthony Hopkins reunited with his Thor co-stars for the premiere of the second film of Thor: The Dark World, by Sir Anthony Hopkins was his beautiful wife Stella Arroyave.Wales born Anthony Hopkins, 75 has been married three times, first with Petronella Barker (1966-1972) Mrs. Barker is the daughter of comedy actor Eric Barker and his wife the actress Pearl Barker and she also is the mother of Mr. Hopkins’ only daughter Abigail Hopkins born on August 20, 1968.In 1973 he got married to Jennifer Lynton, they had no children together during their 29-year-marriage.After their divorce in 2002, Sir Anthony felt into depression, although he said he felt happy, he had shut down from the world, meeting the love of his life was the least thing that crossed his mind, but also the best thing that happened to him.“She met me ten years ago when I was shut down. Shut down for some years. I didn’t feel shut down at that time. I felt I was quite happy. But I was dealing with slight depression. Not trusting anyone. Certainly not trusting women.
“Everyday she wakes up happy. She’s very positive about everything. I learnt from her just to take life as it comes. So I live my life in non -expectation.”57-year-old Stella Arroyave was born on on March 20, 1956 in Popayan, in Cauca, Colombia, Mrs. Arroyave graduated in 1976 from Newtown High School in Elmhurst, NY. She was an art dealer when she met her famous husband in 2002 when he walked inside her art shop Om Furniture And Decorative in Pacific Palisades.Stella and Anthony Hopkins got married on March 1, 2003 in Malibu, California, from that day people began to call her Stella Hopkins.In 2003 Stella Arroyave made her acting debut in Robert Benton’s film The Human Stain starring her husband, Nicole Kidman and Ed Harris, in 2010 she starred as Gina in Slipstream, the film that her husband wrote, directed and that Stella produced.
Michael Caine Reveals His Wife Saved Him From 'Drinking Himself To Death'
19 January 2016
Sir Michael Caine has revealed that had he not met his wife Shakira Baksh, he would likely have ‘drunk myself to death’.In an interview with the Radio Times, the movie legend paid tribute to the steadying influence of his wife of over 40 years.???“Without her I would have been dead long ago. I would have probably drunk myself to death,” he said.“I was a bit of a p*ss artist when I was younger, I used to drink a bottle of vodka a day and I was smoking too, several packs a day.“Meeting Shakira calmed me down. And she’s not the little wife; she runs the whole business side of my life. She’s my right-hand man, my confidante.“I tell her everything. I was famous when I met her, but I couldn’t have got this far without her. She is the most important person in my life.”Caine pursued Shakira, a former actress and model, after he saw her appearing in an advert for Maxwell House coffee in 1971.He then discovered from a friend who worked in advertising that she lived not far from him in London.They were married in Las Vegas two years later.Prior to his marriage to Baksh, Caine was married to the actress Patricia Haines, with who he had a daughter, Dominique.Caine had another daughter, Natasha, with Baksh in 1973.The 'Dark Knight’ star has recently received acclaim for playing a retired orchestra conductor in 'Youth’, opposite Harvey Keitel and Paul Dano.Read more
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