Anthony Hopkins Doesn’t Know and Doesn’t Care if He’s a Grandfather

Anthony Hopkins has a reputation for playing characters who display a considerable detachment from their emotions, and life appears to be imitating art in a new interview with the British magazine Radio Times, in which he says he doesn’t know if he is a grandfather, owing to his estrangement from his only daughter—and he says he doesn’t care.

Hopkins is the father of the actress and singer-songwriter Abigail Hopkins, 48, his only child, born during his first marriage. He walked out on the relationship when his child was a baby.

His daughter got parts alongside him in Shadowlands and The Remains of the Day during a brief reconciliation in the 1990s—which he described as “earth-moving”—but they have since fallen out of contact.

Asked whether he was a grandfather in a new interview, the actor told Radio Times: “I don’t have any idea. People break up. Families split and you get on with your life. People make choices. I don’t care one way or the other.”

When told that sounded cold, he said: “Well, it is cold. Because life is cold. It’s like John Osborne’s response when someone said to him, ‘Mr. Osborne, your play is so offensive,’ and he said, ‘Life is offensive.’”

Abigail Hopkins maintains an up-to-date website, which says that her upcoming projects include a music video for the track “It’s Only Five Miles to the Sea,” from her forthcoming album Remembrance/Reverie, and that she is developing the script for a psychological thriller short film, The Weather House, and other feature-length projects for 2018.

Abigail’s recent acting work also includes a part in Still the Most Shocking Second a Day for Save the Children’s fundraising campaign for Syrian child refugees.

She has battled drug addiction and said, in a previous interview: “I came very close to killing myself. The root cause was that my father and I had an intermittent relationship.”

Hopkins, who won the Best Actor Oscar in 1992 for playing Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, also slammed Hollywood culture in the interview, saying: “Look at Hollywood, how insidious it is. Look how people feel entitled to this, that and the other, and they can only be surrounded by ‘yes’ people,” he told the magazine. “There’s so much hypocrisy... and they know nothing.”

Hopkins, who plays King Lear in a new BBC film, criticized “gloopy American sentimentalism” saying, “It’s the inability to use words properly. ‘He passed on.’ What do you mean? He died,” he said. “Lear understands there’s nothing nice about death. There’s no respectable way of looking at it.”