Anthony Hopkins' Life in Photos

Anthony Hopkins' Childhood

Philip Anthony Hopkins was born in Margam, Glamora, Wales, on Dec. 31, 1937, the only child of parents Muriel and Richard Hopkins. Richard was a baker, and Hopkins remembered him as being tough but funny: "He wasn't always irascible; he had a great sense of humor. ... I was born just before the war, and afterward we went through the years of Depression and rationing, but my father was always fighting back. ... He was a remarkable old man, and he won lots of silver cups—I've got them here—for making cakes and doughnuts."

Anthony Hopkins' Childhood

On Instagram, the actor shared a portrait of himself as a boy, drawn by his art teacher in 1944. Hopkins said that he was encouraged to pursue art and music by his teachers and parents, and he still composes and paints to this day.

"I started [piano] as a kid. I was five. My mother made me go for music lessons, and I took to it. I attempt to do very difficult pieces by Rachmaninoff and Chopin and Scriabin. I have no ambitions to play at Carnegie Hall or anything like that, but I do it for my own pleasure," he told The New Yorker. "And I paint. My wife got me to paint some years ago, because she found some old drawings of mine. So now I sell my paintings, and there's quite a market for them."