
DATE: Monday, September 29, 1997            TAG: 9709270070

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  174 lines

HOPKINS, NOTED FOR QUIET ROLES, RELISHES GETTING INTO THE ``ACTION''

SITTING AROUND talking with acting legend Sir Anthony Hopkins about the bare necessities. Make that the BEAR necessities.

The legend is remarkably soft-spoken, and casual, about the joys of being a movie star.

``I just hope it lasts a while longer,'' he said.

Hopkins, one of the more distinguished actors of this generation, has played a butler (``Remains of the Day''), vampire hunter (``Dracula''), cannibal (``The Silence of the Lambs'') and ventriloquist (``Magic'') but no role has challenged him in quite the way his current film, ``The Edge,'' did.

In it, he played bear bait.

``The Edge'' is what he calls his debut as a pure ``action'' actor.

``I have no illusions about myself,'' he said softly as he sat at the Four

Seasons hotel in Toronto on the morning after the movie's world premiere. ``I come from the stage, but I'm not classically trained - not in the usual way. I'm not an intellectual. I have a bedroom scene with Elle Macpherson in this picture, but I'm not a conventional leading man. But in spite of any of it, I always wanted to make an outright `tough' movie. `The Edge' is that film.''

To get it made, he had to go through dangerous surgery, brave temperatures 20 degrees below zero, rappel down jagged mountain cliffs, and endure icy rain storms and blinding blizzards. He is 59 year old, with silver-gray hair that he combs back from his broad forehead.

So, has he learned his lesson?

``Quite to the contrary,'' he vowed. ``I'll never again play one of those guys who are dead from the kneecaps up. They're quite easy to play, you know. In `Howard's End' and `The Remains of the Day,' I just talked quietly and moved slowly.

``When I was younger, those roles were harder. I'd study the motivation and all that. That's making it hard. If you stay around long enough in acting, it gets easier. You simplify it. By doing nothing, I let the audience do the work.''

He recalled, laughingly, that people always ask him what he was thinking during ``Remains of the Day.''

``What I was thinking was, `What time is lunch?' ''

He fooled the Oscar voters. He was nominated for both roles.

Hopkins has only fond things to say about his ``Edge'' co-star Bart, the 1,400-pound bear that was his nemesis.

``He's an incredible creature. His trainers have done a remarkable job,'' Hopkins said.

It's not the first time Hopkins has co-starred with the bear. They also worked together in ``Legends of the Fall.''

``He lived in a huge steel trailer that could have been the home of King Kong,'' Hopkins remembered. ``For the most part, he just left the trailer, hit his marks and then got his reward, pasta or a whole baked chicken. That's what he wanted. The rules were: No smoking around him, no food, and never look him in the eye. It makes him nervous, or aggressive, if you make eye contact with him. We always looked down on the ground when around him. The thing to remember is that he wasn't interested in us. He just wanted a baked chicken.''

Lee Tamahari, director of ``The Edge,'' said: ``Bart has been in captivity for 19 years. He's very gentle, but you have to always be aware of his strength and size - and that he could turn killer at any moment. He has soft paws, and that was a problem. He'd never run on rough stones in his life. We built a soft rubber track for him to run on during the chase scenes through the woods, but he didn't like that either. It was a problem.''

The director, though, is proud of the ``fierce'' scenes he got between Hopkins and Bart.

``In every other bear movie, the bear always rears up on two legs when he gets mad,'' Tamahari said. ``That is absurd. A bear is most vulnerable when he's standing upright. They'd never do that. Bart did add one touch. When Anthony is hanging on a tree across a ravine, Bart slaps at it with his paws to try and knock him off. That comes naturally. We left it in the movie. The movie is 95 percent real Bart bear and 5 percent fake bear, for safety.''

For Hopkins, though, working with the bear was the lesser of his troubles. He went into the movie with a ruptured disc in his neck, aggravated by months of simulating the stooped posture of former President Richard M. Nixon during the filming of ``Nixon.''

``The broken disc was pushing against a nerve in my neck,'' he said. ``I could hardly use my right arm. I couldn't sleep. It was hell. On top of that, the insurance company was watching closely when I showed up for the first day of shooting `The Edge.' I took so many pain relievers that I couldn't feel the cold. That can be very dangerous. It got to the point that it had to be either surgery or a bullet. The pain was unbearable.''

After only one day of shooting in the Rocky Mountain range in Canada, he fled to a hospital in Calgary. After a two-hour operation, the pain was gone.

``It was the biggest miracle of my life,'' Hopkins said. ``To be free of pain, I know now, is the greatest gift anyone can have. I missed only one day of filming.''

His human co-star is Alec Baldwin, whom he calls ``one of the best actors I've worked with. He's made some bad movies and is currently underrated, but he was wonderful in `The Hunt for Red October'' and ``Glengarry Glen Ross.' ''

The characters played by Baldwin and Hopkins, in addition to battling the Alaskan wilderness after an airplane crash, battle each other over Elle Macpherson (who's married to Hopkins in the plot).

Hopkins was born in the same small Welsh village as his boyhood idol, Richard Burton. He still remembers the day he bravely knocked on the door where the famous Burton was visiting his parents and asked him for an autograph. ``He signed it and grunted,'' Hopkins said.

Hopkins now lives in California by himself. His second wife, Jenni, lives in England most of the time. He has a grown daughter from an earlier marriage. ``I'm good at my job but bad at relationships,'' he said. ``I stay in my house for days at a time when I'm not working. My wife accepts the situation.''

His hobby is driving cross-country. ``It's like therapy,'' he says. ``I drove across Texas and to New Orleans once. I drove to Calgary, Canada, to make this movie. People seldom recognize me. When they do, it's always as Hannibal Lector (the flesh-eating serial murderer he won an Academy Award for playing in ``The Silence of the Lambs.''). They're quite shy about asking `Aren't you Hannibal Lector?' I think, sometimes, they're quite scared.''

Beginning his acting career at age 17 in a YMCA production, he progressed through repertory companies, a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1961 and Sir Laurence Olivier's understudy at the National Theater.

``I always felt like an outsider in the British theater community,'' he said. ``I always felt as if I was at school. I wasn't classically trained and, besides, I was too impatient. I'd get bored with a play on the second night. I always wanted to be moving. I have trouble staying still. I even eat on the hoof. I usually eat standing up at home so I can do other things at the same time.''

He calls himself ``hyperactive'' and admits to ``smoking, drinking and destroying myself.'' He quit drinking 20 years ago, though, ``because I was becoming impossible to work with.''

His first movie was ``The Lion in Winter'' in 1968 with Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn, whom he described as ``a tough old broad.''

He won Emmy Awards for both ``The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case'' in 1976 and ``The Bunker,'' in which he played Adolf Hitler, in 1981. In 1993, he was summoned to Buckingham Palace, where Queen Elizabeth II named him a Knight of the Realm.''

He's frankly amazed by it all, especially being in movies.

``I was about ready to return to England just before `Silence of the Lambs' ,'' he said. ``I was getting only television stuff, then the Academy Award came. I quite like being a film actor. I have no desire to return to the stage.''

And just to prove that he wants to remain an action star, he's filming ``The Mask of Zorro.''

``Lots of riding and stuff,'' he chuckled. ``A little like John Wayne.'' ILLUSTRATION: 20TH CENTURY FOX

Anthony Hopkins in "The Edge."

20TH CENTURY FOX

Anthony Hopkins is confronted by Bart the bear in the movie thriler

``The Edge.''

THE FILMS OF ANTHONY HOPKINS

``The Lion in Winter'' 1968

``The Looking Glass War'' 1969

``Young Winston'' 1972

``The Girl From Petrovka'' 1974

``Juggernaut'' 1974