During this period Hopkins won Emmy Awards for his performances as Bruno Richard Hauptmann in The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case (1976) and as Adolf Hitler in The Bunker (1981). In 1989 he made his West End stage debut in the musical drama M. Butterfly. While critical acclaim has been lavished upon Hopkins’s rich, full-blooded characterizations of such real-life personalities as Yitzhak Rabin, John Quincy Adams, Richard M. Nixon, C.S. Lewis, and Pablo Picasso, the film role with which he is most identified, and for which he received an Academy Award, was that of the horrifyingly brilliant serial killer Hannibal (“the Cannibal”) Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
