Age: 88
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Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins CBE (born December 31, 1937) is a Welsh and American actor, film director, and film producer. He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, four British Academy Film Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards and a British Academy Television Award. He has also received an honorary Golden Globe Award and the BAFTA Fellowship from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. In 1993, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to the arts, and in 2003, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his achievements in the motion picture industry. After graduating from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in 1957, Hopkins 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 1965. Productions at the National included King Lear, his favourite Shakespeare play. His last stage play was a West End production of M. Butterfly in 1989. In 1968, Hopkins achieved recognition in film, playing Richard the Lionheart in The Lion in Winter. In the mid-1970s, Richard Attenborough, who directed five Hopkins films, called him "the greatest actor of his generation." In 1991, he portrayed Hannibal Lecter in the psychological horror film The Silence of the Lambs, winning the Academy Award for Best Actor. He reprised the role in its sequel Hannibal and the prequel Red Dragon. Other notable films include The Elephant Man (1980), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), Howards End (1992), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Shadowlands (1993), Legends of the Fall (1994), Meet Joe Black (1998), The Mask of Zorro (1998), Thor (2011), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Transformers: The Last Knight (2017), and Thor: Ragnarok (2017). He received four more Academy Award nominations for The Remains of the Day (1993), Nixon (1995), Amistad (1997) and The Two Popes (2019) before winning a fourth BAFTA Award and a second Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of an elderly man diagnosed with dementia in The Father (2020), becoming the oldest Best Actor Oscar winner to date. Since making his television debut with the BBC in 1967, Hopkins has continued to appear on television. In 1973 he received a British Academy Television Award for Best Actor for his performance in War and Peace. In 2015, he starred in the BBC film The Dresser alongside Ian McKellen. In 2018, he starred in King Lear opposite Emma Thompson. In 2016 and 2018, he starred in the HBO television series Westworld, for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.
The narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his grand-uncle, Brown University linguistic professor George Gammell Angell, after his death in the winter of 1926–27. Among the notes is a small bas-relief sculpture of a scaly creature which yields "simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature." The sculptor, a Rhode Island art student named Henry Anthony Wilcox, based the work on delirious dreams of "great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths." Frequent references to Cthulhu and R'lyeh are found in Wilcox's papers. Angell also discovers reports of mass hysteria around the world. More notes discuss a 1908 meeting of an archeological society in which New Orleans police official John Raymond Legrasse asks attendees to identify a statuette of unidentifiable greenish-black stone resembling Wilcox's sculpture. It is then revealed that the previous year, Legrasse and a party of policemen found several women and children being used in a ritual by an all-male cult. After killing five of the cultists and arresting 47 others, Legrasse learns that they worship the "Great Old Ones" and await the return of a monstrous being called Cthulhu.[2] The prisoners identify the statuette as "great Cthulhu." One of the academics present at the meeting, Princeton professor William Channing Webb, describes a group of "Esquimaux" with similar beliefs and fetishes. Thurston discovers a 1925 article from an Australian newspaper which reports the discovery of a derelict ship, the Emma, of which second mate Gustaf Johansen is the sole survivor. Johansen reports that the Emma was attacked by a heavily armed yacht named the Alert. The crewmen of the Emma killed those aboard the Alert, but lost their own ship in the battle, commandeered the Alert, and discovered an uncharted island in the vicinity of co-ordinates of 47°9′S 126°43′W. With the exception of Johansen and another man, the remaining crew died on the island. Johansen does not reveal the manner of their death. Upon traveling to Australia, Thurston views a statue retrieved from the Alert which is identical to the previous two. In Norway, he learns that Johansen died suddenly after an encounter with "two Lascar sailors". Johansen's widow provides Thurston with her late husband's manuscript, wherein the uncharted island is described as being home to a "nightmare corpse-city" called R'lyeh. Johansen's crew struggled to comprehend the non-Euclidean geometry of the city and accidentally release Cthulhu, resulting in their deaths. Johansen and one crew-mate flee aboard the Alert and are pursued by Cthulhu. Johansen rams the yacht into the creature's head, only for its injury to regenerate. The Alert escapes, but Johansen's crewmate dies. After finishing the manuscript, Thurston realizes he is now a target of Cthulhu's worshippers.
