To make matters worse, Hopkins was nowhere to be found in Hollywood’s Union Station, having taken to his bed in a very different timezone in Wales. All of which meant that the 93rd Academy Awards ended with a whimper, and much dark muttering.

But Hopkins may well have been the worthy winner. The Father is practically the only one of last week’s Oscar winners I haven’t seen, but American reviewers have described his portrayal of a man angrily battling dementia as a brilliant, mercurial tour de force.

At 83, he is the oldest winner of an acting Oscar, which is surely a cause for celebration. At a time of life when most actors — and civilians — have their trotters up, he shows no sign of slowing down: in the last year he has starred in three movies, one of them (Elyse) directed by his wife, Stella.

This is not his first Best Actor Academy Award of course: he won back in 1992 for his unforgettable portrayal of urbane maniac Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs. That performance, often imitated, much lampooned, remains his most famous, but is only one highlight in a truly remarkable career.

Like most of the great British actors of his generation, he started on the stage, but Hopkins came to hate it. In 1973, he walked out of a National Theatre production of Macbeth in mid-run and moved to Los Angeles.

There, after several false starts, he would eventually establish himself as a major star, and since winning that first Oscar has had his pick of roles.

Despite his many triumphs, Hopkins has never taken himself too seriously. “I’ve never considered myself a great actor,” he has said. “I’m a fluke. I work hard and I see through the bastards and to this day, I have massive energy.”

Saying lines someone else has written is, he says “a comic way to make a living, but I can express something through acting”. Indeed he can, and Hopkins’ ice-blue eyes, hypnotic voice, on-screen stillness and poise have lifted many a film into excellence.

After winning his Oscar last week, he visited his father’s grave in south Wales to honour his memory with some Dylan Thomas, reading aloud the poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. It was a touching moment, but as the actor has often admitted, he and his dad didn’t always see eye to eye.

Philip Anthony Hopkins was born on New Year’s Eve, 1937 in a working-class suburb of Port Talbot, the steel town that also gave us Richard Burton. His father, Richard, was a baker who later ran a pub, and Anthony was an only child.

“My father was a tough man,” Hopkins has said. “He was a pretty red-hot guy but he was also cold. He was also slightly disappointed in me because I was not a good kid as a schoolboy. But I learned from it; I liked that coldness, because it was harsh. And he taught me to be tough. I know how to be ruthless.”

Hopkins did terribly at school in academic terms, was a loner who preferred to paint or practise the piano. He found concentrating difficult, and “grew up absolutely convinced I was stupid”. He has, only recently, been diagnosed with Asperger’s.

A love of cinema stemmed from childhood visits to the movies with his parents: he particularly loved the Cagney/Bogart gangster films.

When he was 15, his head was turned by the sight of Richard Burton returning to Port Talbot in triumph, signing autographs and swanning around town in a Rolls-Royce. Perhaps, he thought, acting might be the way to go. “I knew then,” he said many years later, “that I wanted to be famous.”

In 1955 — at the suggestion of his father, who may have been a frustrated actor himself — he joined the local YMCA and began appearing in amateur performances. “I wanted instant stardom,” he told Michael Parkinson later, “but it took a long time.”

After completing his national service, Hopkins went to London to study at Rada. And in 1965, having slogged it out in repertory theatre for several years, taking small roles and sometimes working as a manager, he was invited by Laurence Olivier to join the National Theatre. Young Anthony was determined to hit the ground running.

“I had non-speaking parts,” he later remembered, “messengers and God knows what, and I was very disgruntled, because I wanted to be bigger. So I went to the casting director and said, ‘who do you have to sleep with to get a part around here?’ I’d only been there three weeks!”

Olivier, who had already spotted his talent, was amused, and later noted in his memoir, “a new young actor of exceptional promise named Anthony Hopkins was understudying me and walked away with the part of Edgar like a cat with a mouse between his teeth”.

Hopkins’ theatrical career was up and running, and through the late 1960s and 70s, starring roles in Macbeth, The Tempest, Coriolanus and Equus established him as one of the great stage actors of his generation, and led to much acclaim. He also made his name on television, playing the role of Pierre Bezukhov in a 1972 BBC production of War and Peace.

But Hollywood was the real goal, and his father was of the same opinion. “You don’t want to hang around here,” Dick Hopkins told his son shortly after he had joined the National Theatre, “you want to be making money like Richard Burton.” 

He had made his big-screen feature debut back in 1968, playing Richard the Lionheart opposite Peter O’Toole’s rakish Henry II in The Lion in Winter. He greatly admired O’Toole as an actor, and envied the ease with which he had broken into film at a young age. It would take Hopkins a lot longer.  

Through the 1980s he juggled film and stage work. Starring roles in films such as The Elephant Man, The Bounty and 84 Charing Cross Road increased his profile in America, but it was Silence of the Lambs that finally catapulted him to stardom.

The late Sean Connery was Jonathan Demme’s first choice to play lunatic psychiatrist Dr Hannibal Lecter, but at that point the Scot was in great demand, and he declined.

When Hopkins was approached about the film, he thought it was a children’s story. The script persuaded him otherwise, and he quickly decided it was “the best part I’d ever read”.

Hopkins’ approach to playing Lecter was ingenious: he gave him an ingratiating manner, chilling politeness, a monotone delivery, eyes that never blinked — most of all, though, a kind of stillness.

“How do you play Hannibal Lecter?” he explained. “Well just don’t move. Scare people by being still.”

By the time he was offered that role, Hopkins had returned to Britain with his tail between his legs and reconciled himself to “being a respectable actor poncing around the West End and doing respectable BBC work for the rest of my life”.

But Silence of the Lambs changed everything: it was one of the biggest-grossing films of 1991, and garnered five Oscars, including Best Actor of course. Film offers flooded in.

He has been appearing in three or four feature films a year ever since, mixing broader fare (superhero and action films) with more rarefied and literary work, such as Howards End, The Remains of the Day, and Shadowlands.

He has played Richard Nixon (rather brilliantly) for Oliver Stone in Nixon, and another American President, John Quincy Adams, for Steven Spielberg in Amistad. His role choices can seem quixotic, and suggest he is a man who enjoys the film-making process itself very much.

His vast potential, his quicksilver intensity, is rarely caught by most of the films he appears in, and he looks amused in productions such as The Wolfman, Fracture, The Rite and Thor.

But Hopkins would be the first to dismiss the idea that genre pictures like that are somehow beneath him. It’s all work, and he likes to keep busy. “Work has kept me going,” Hopkins told the Guardian recently. “Work has given me energy.”

As a younger man, Hopkins battled an alcohol addiction, but unlike the generation of hellraisers that had preceded him, he resisted the clichés of Celtic self-destruction.

By his own account, he was a terrible drinker, without the heroic capacities of Burton, Harris or O’Toole, and says that quitting, in 1975 felt like being liberated. And his experiences with addiction have fuelled his work.

“I’m very happy I’m an alcoholic — it’s a great gift, because wherever I go, the abyss follows me. It’s a volcanic anger you have, and it’s fuel. Rocket fuel.”

When The Father opens in cinemas here, hopefully at the end of June, we’ll get a chance to see that rocket fuel in action, as Hopkins plays an old man raging against the dying of the light. It sounds like one of those rare roles that is actually worthy of his talent.