Anthony Hopkins Movies: 10 Essential Films, Ranked

Anthony Hopkins movies span almost six decades, from his first feature in 1968 to a slate of new projects still in production as he approaches his 89th birthday on 31 December 2026. In that time the Welsh actor has won two Academy Awards from six nominations and played a cannibal, a butler, a pope and a president.

His essential films are not always his biggest. A smaller picture built around a career-best turn usually matters more than a large production where Hopkins is one face among many, which is why a 1978 horror drama and a play about a man with dementia sit alongside Hannibal Lecter.

Anthony Hopkins Movies Ranked: Year, Role and Director

#	Movie	Year	Role	Director
1	The Silence of the Lambs	1991	Dr. Hannibal Lecter	Jonathan Demme
2	The Father	2020	Anthony	Florian Zeller
3	The Remains of the Day	1993	James Stevens	James Ivory
4	The Elephant Man	1980	Frederick Treves	David Lynch
5	Shadowlands	1993	C. S. Lewis	Richard Attenborough
6	Nixon	1995	Richard Nixon	Oliver Stone
7	The Lion in Winter	1968	Richard	Anthony Harvey
8	The Two Popes	2019	Pope Benedict XVI	Fernando Meirelles
9	Howards End	1992	Henry J. Wilcox	James Ivory
10	Magic	1978	Corky Withers	Richard Attenborough

The 10 Essential Anthony Hopkins Movies, Counted Down

10. Magic (1978)

Director: Richard Attenborough | Role: Corky Withers and the voice of Fats | Co-stars: Ann-Margret, Burgess Meredith

William Goldman adapted his own novel for this psychological horror drama, directed by Richard Attenborough with a score by Jerry Goldsmith. Hopkins plays Corky Withers, a shy magician who becomes a star once he adds a foul-mouthed ventriloquist’s dummy called Fats to his act. Ann-Margret and Burgess Meredith co-star.

Hopkins voices the dummy as well, and the arguments between Corky and Fats are the most unsettling thing in the film. It earned him nominations at the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, and it is the best early sign of the menace he would bring to Lecter 13 years later.

9. Howards End (1992)

Director: James Ivory | Role: Henry J. Wilcox | Co-stars: Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Vanessa Redgrave

Merchant Ivory’s adaptation of E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel follows the bohemian Schlegel sisters (Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter) as their lives tangle with the wealthy Wilcox family. Hopkins plays Henry Wilcox, the businessman who marries Thompson’s Margaret after the death of his first wife (Vanessa Redgrave).

The film led the 65th Academy Awards with nine nominations and won three, including Best Actress for Thompson. Hopkins makes Wilcox charming and blinkered in equal measure, a man who believes in his own decency right up to the moment it costs someone else everything. It was the first of his two films opposite Thompson for James Ivory.

8. The Two Popes (2019)

Director: Fernando Meirelles | Role: Pope Benedict XVI | Co-star: Jonathan Pryce | Oscar: Best Supporting Actor, nominated

Fernando Meirelles directed Anthony McCarten’s script, adapted from McCarten’s play The Pope, about a series of conversations between Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), the man who would become Pope Francis. It is mostly two men talking in gardens, dining rooms and the Sistine Chapel.

Pryce, Hopkins and McCarten were all nominated at the Academy Awards. Hopkins plays Benedict as stiff, lonely and quietly funny, a conservative scholar who knows he is the wrong man for the job and is looking for a way out. The chemistry between the two leads carries every scene.

7. The Lion in Winter (1968)

Director: Anthony Harvey | Role: Richard (the future Richard I) | Co-stars: Peter O’Toole, Katharine Hepburn, Timothy Dalton

Hopkins’s first feature film drops him into a Christmas court in 1183, where Henry II (Peter O’Toole) and the imprisoned Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn) fight over which of their sons should inherit the crown. Hopkins plays Richard, the future Richard the Lionheart, opposite John Castle and Timothy Dalton, who was making his own film debut.

Holding the screen against O’Toole and Hepburn at their most theatrical is no small thing, and Hopkins earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Hepburn won her third Best Actress Oscar, and James Goldman’s script still crackles. Seen today, it is a chance to watch a future great arrive fully formed.

6. Nixon (1995)

Director: Oliver Stone | Role: Richard Nixon | Co-stars: Joan Allen, James Woods, Ed Harris | Oscar: Best Actor, nominated

Oliver Stone’s epic follows Richard Nixon from a hard childhood to the resignation, with Joan Allen as Pat Nixon and a supporting cast that includes James Woods, Ed Harris, Paul Sorvino and Bob Hoskins. Hopkins does not look much like the 37th president, and he does not try to do an impression.

What he finds instead is the man’s loneliness. His Nixon is clever, wounded and incapable of believing anyone likes him, which makes the paranoia feel earned. The film struggled at the box office, but Hopkins earned his third Best Actor nomination, and it holds up as one of the boldest political portraits of the 1990s.

5. Shadowlands (1993)

Director: Richard Attenborough | Role: C. S. “Jack” Lewis | Co-star: Debra Winger

Richard Attenborough directed this account of the late marriage between Oxford academic C. S. Lewis and the American poet Joy Davidman (Debra Winger), and of the cancer that ended it. William Nicholson adapted his own television film and stage play. The film won the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film.

It arrived in the same year as The Remains of the Day, and the two make a fine double bill: both are about a reserved Englishman who has organised his life to avoid feeling too much. Here the defences finally break, and Hopkins plays Lewis’s grief with a rawness that the butler never allows himself.

4. The Elephant Man (1980)

Director: David Lynch | Role: Frederick Treves | Co-stars: John Hurt, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud

David Lynch’s black-and-white drama tells the story of Joseph Merrick, called John in the film and played by John Hurt under heavy make-up, a severely deformed man exhibited as a sideshow attraction in Victorian London. Hopkins plays Frederick Treves, the surgeon who takes Merrick into the London Hospital. Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud and Wendy Hiller round out the cast, and Freddie Francis shot it.

Treves is the audience’s way into the story, and Hopkins gives him a conscience that keeps working after the credits. In one early scene he simply looks at Merrick for the first time, and a single tear does more than a speech could. It was the film that showed Hollywood what he could do with stillness, a decade before Lecter.

3. The Remains of the Day (1993)

Director: James Ivory | Role: James Stevens | Co-stars: Emma Thompson, James Fox, Christopher Reeve | Oscar: Best Actor, nominated

Merchant Ivory’s version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel casts Hopkins as James Stevens, head butler at Darlington Hall in the years before the Second World War. Emma Thompson plays Miss Kenton, the housekeeper who loves him, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote the screenplay. James Fox, Christopher Reeve and a young Hugh Grant fill out the house and its visitors.

The film earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor for Hopkins, and he won the BAFTA for Best Actor. The whole performance is built on suppression. Stevens never says what he feels, so Hopkins lets it leak through a held breath or a half-second pause, and the result is one of the saddest portraits of wasted loyalty on film.

2. The Father (2020)

Director: Florian Zeller | Role: Anthony | Co-stars: Olivia Colman, Imogen Poots, Rufus Sewell | Oscar: Best Actor, won

Florian Zeller made his directing debut adapting his own 2012 play Le Père, co-writing the screenplay with Christopher Hampton. Hopkins plays Anthony, an octogenarian living with dementia, while Olivia Colman plays the daughter trying to care for him. The flat around him keeps shifting, and faces swap actors without warning, so the audience shares his confusion rather than watching it.

Hopkins won Best Actor at the 93rd Academy Awards, becoming the oldest winner in the category, and added a BAFTA the same season. Zeller and Hampton won for Adapted Screenplay. It is the rare late career role that rivals the one that made him famous: no menace, no accent, only a proud man realising, scene by scene, that he can no longer trust his own mind.

1. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Director: Jonathan Demme | Role: Dr. Hannibal Lecter | Co-stars: Jodie Foster, Ted Levine | Oscar: Best Actor, won

Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel sends FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) to a high-security cell to ask an imprisoned psychiatrist for help catching the killer known as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). The psychiatrist is Dr. Hannibal Lecter, and Hopkins plays him as the most courteous man in any room he occupies, which is exactly what makes him frightening.

At the 64th Academy Awards the film swept the Big Five: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Adapted Screenplay. It remains the only horror film to win Best Picture, and it anchors our ranking of scary movies for good reason. Hopkins also took the BAFTA for Best Actor. No other role is as closely tied to his name, and no other performance of his has been imitated as often.

Anthony Hopkins Oscar Nominations, Film by Film

Hopkins has been nominated for an Academy Award six times and has won twice, both times for Best Actor. The nominations cover almost three decades:

• The Silence of the Lambs (1991): Best Actor, won
• The Remains of the Day (1993): Best Actor, nominated
• Nixon (1995): Best Actor, nominated
• Amistad (1997): Best Supporting Actor, nominated for playing John Quincy Adams
• The Two Popes (2019): Best Supporting Actor, nominated
• The Father (2020): Best Actor, won

He has also won four BAFTA Awards and two Primetime Emmys, the latter for the television films The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case and The Bunker. He was knighted for services to drama in 1993.

Hannibal Lecter Movies in Order

Hopkins played Lecter in three films. They were released out of story order, so the sequence depends on whether you want the timeline or the original experience:

• Red Dragon (2002): the prequel, directed by Brett Ratner, with Edward Norton as FBI agent Will Graham and Ralph Fiennes as the killer Francis Dolarhyde
• The Silence of the Lambs (1991): the original, with Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling
• Hannibal (2001): the sequel, directed by Ridley Scott, with Julianne Moore taking over as Starling and Gary Oldman as Mason Verger

First-time viewers should start with The Silence of the Lambs. Red Dragon works better once you already know who Lecter becomes, and Hannibal turns him from the supporting threat into the lead.

New and Upcoming Anthony Hopkins Movies

Hopkins has kept a steady pace into his late 80s. His recent releases include One Life (2023), as the humanitarian Nicholas Winton, Freud’s Last Session (2023), as Sigmund Freud, and the thriller Locked (2025), in which he plays the sadistic owner of a car that traps Bill Skarsgård’s thief inside it.

Several more films are in the pipeline:

• Wife & Dog: Guy Ritchie’s action thriller with Benedict Cumberbatch and Rosamund Pike, scheduled for February 19, 2027
• Maserati: The Brothers: Robert Moresco’s biographical drama about the Maserati brothers, with Al Pacino, Andy García and Jessica Alba
• Eyes in the Trees: a science fiction horror film from director Timothy Woodward Jr. that reimagines H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau
• The Housekeeper: Richard Eyre’s romantic drama with Helena Bonham Carter and Caitríona Balfe

He also published a memoir, We Did OK, Kid, in November 2025.

How to Judge an Anthony Hopkins Performance

Screen time is a poor guide to Hopkins’s best work. Lecter appears for only a fraction of The Silence of the Lambs, yet the character dominates every scene he is absent from. The performances that last tend to share three traits:

• Control: the stillness in The Elephant Man and The Remains of the Day, where a look carries the scene
• Range inside the role: Corky and Fats in Magic, or Nixon swinging from charm to self-pity in one speech
• A film strong enough to hold him: his best roles sit inside movies that would be worth watching without him

Recognition tends to follow those traits. The Silence of the Lambs, The Remains of the Day, Nixon, The Two Popes and The Father each brought him an Oscar nomination, and two of them became wins.

Which Anthony Hopkins Movie to Watch First

Start with what you are in the mood for rather than the release year:

• For a thriller: The Silence of the Lambs, then Magic
• For a period drama: The Remains of the Day, then Howards End
• For true stories: The Elephant Man, Nixon or Shadowlands
• For a modern drama: The Father, then The Two Popes
• For lighter fare: his Odin in the Thor films, all listed in our Marvel movies in order guide

If you only have time for one, make it The Father. It is short, devastating and shows everything Hopkins can do at an age when most actors have long since retired.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Anthony Hopkins’ best movie?

The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is his best-known film and won him his first Academy Award for Best Actor. The Father (2020), which brought his second, is the strongest case for a rival at the top.

How many Oscars has Anthony Hopkins won?

He has won two Academy Awards, both for Best Actor: The Silence of the Lambs at the 64th ceremony and The Father at the 93rd. He has six nominations in total.

What was Anthony Hopkins’ first movie?

His first feature film was The Lion in Winter (1968), in which he played Richard opposite Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn. He had appeared in the short film The White Bus a year earlier.

What is the newest Anthony Hopkins movie?

His most recent US release is the thriller Locked (2025), co-starring Bill Skarsgård. Guy Ritchie’s Wife & Dog, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Rosamund Pike, is scheduled for February 19, 2027.

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