You’d hardly know it from his low media profile – after all, he’s hardly the kind to be snapped by the paparazzi coming out of swanky restaurants – but this winter rounds off a landmark year for Sir Anthony Hopkins. In spring he enjoyed his biggest hit for years with the film Fracture, where he played a suave psychopath. Last month saw the US release of Slipstream, a quasi-autobiographical film which he also wrote and directed. And this month sees Beowulf, an exercise in breakthrough animation technology, sweep into cinemas. Not only that, but on 31 December he will celebrate his 70th birthday – and 40 years in film – with an uncharacteristically lavish party in his native Wales.

Among his guests will be Graham Jenkins, Richard Burton’s brother. [The actor changed his surname, taking the name of his teacher and mentor, Phillip Burton.] According to Jenkins, the event, which will be held in Port Talbot, the childhood stomping ground coincidentally of both Hopkins and Burton, is shrouded in secrecy. “My wife knew his family more than I did as a child,” is all Jenkins will say of the event. “But I’m looking forward to it.”

The invitation seals a momentous story of competitive ambition and strange serendipity. Richard Burton, cherished for half a century as one of the nation’s greatest actors, was born in Pontrhydyfen in 1925; Hopkins was born down the road in Margam in 1937. The young Hopkins simply wanted to be Burton. The actors met only twice: once when Hopkins asked his idol for an autograph in the 1950s and again when Hopkins replaced Burton in the play Equus on Broadway in 1974. Today, according to an American Film Institute poll, Hopkins ranks as the third best movie actor of all time (after Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp) while Burton, ironically, doesn’t squeeze into the top 10. “What a strange cycle,” says Hopkins of his success. “And going back will be full circle.”

Those who imagine Hopkins’ return to be some sort of triumphalist swagger couldn’t be further from the truth. Certainly he has his reasons to boast. He has the Best Actor Oscar that Burton never won (awarded for The Silence of the Lambs in 1992) and the knighthood that Burton was never granted (given in 1993). And, of course, he has conquered the alcoholism, something, sadly, which Burton never managed.

But, like Burton, Hopkins has not shaken what he calls “the darkness” inside him. And much of this, believe many who are close to him, originates from his youth. “Welshness always confused him,” observed his childhood friend Brian Evans. “And anything that confused Anthony made him angry. It became a mortal challenge to him.” In this light, many of his friends view going back; not just visiting Wales, but the making of his introspective movie Slipstream, too, as the inevitable resumption of a challenge laid down 70 years ago.

It was the death of his mother, Muriel, in 2003 which was the catalyst for this phase of self-inquiry for Hopkins and got him thinking “about God and space and time and the things that happened to me”. Slipstream, which resulted from these ruminations, is the story of a high-principled screenwriter forced to bend under the pressure of making a movie with an immature director and an idiot producer. Critics noted the cynicism of the movie (“The depiction of Hollywood seethes with contempt,” read The Hollywood Reporter) but Hopkins’ friends weren’t surprised. “Tony never said he loved Hollywood,” says one. “He certainly loved America since he was a little kid and wanted an American life. But Slipstream is his observation of the chaos at the heart of it all. It’s about conflict, and all artists thrive on conflict.”

Muriel Hopkins tried to still the conflict in the young Anthony, her only child, all those years ago. As a boy, his world was dominated by men: Old Dick, his baker grandfather, who was a socialist-political powerhouse with arms like legs of ham, and Young Dick, his ambitious father, who inherited the bakery business and was prone to Sir Anthony Hopkins gained international recognition with his infamous role as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, inset opposite explosive outbursts. Their intention was for Anthony to take on the family business, but the young lad was a daydreamer, obsessed, according to Evans, with Dick Barton – Special

When he was failing at school, Muriel bought her son a piano by way of compensatory distraction. The bigger influence came when he was eight, just as the war was ending, when she started taking in US military lodgers. The Americans sparked a new lease of life in the boy. He marvelled at their easy optimism, an impression that was magnified by the Hollywood films that he also discovered, in particular the Humphrey Bogart action-movie Sahara. Some 30 years later, Hopkins told Ed Lauter, his co-star in Richard Attenborough’s Magic, that he owed it all to Bogie.

“In the 1970s he would drive up to Mapleton where Bogie lived,” recalls Lauter. “He would park his Cadillac at the curb and just stare at that house thinking about all the joy he’d been given.” Lauter believes that Bogie became

“a kind of fantasy father figure” for Hopkins, someone who represented the self-sufficient, emotionally controlled masculinity that would become the actor’s trademark.

While Richard Burton remained consistently loyal to Wales, Hopkins was ambivalent. By the time he made his first Hollywood movie, having earned his stripes with a scholarship at RADA and a four-year run in regional theatre, he was bursting to get away from Britain. Anthony Harvey, who directed Hopkins’ debut feature film The Lion in Winter, in 1968, recalls that the actor was “very un-Welsh. He didn’t speak the language, or want to go there at all. His energy was all about moving on.”

Perhaps it was Hopkins’ frantic desire for the Hollywood escape that led to a tangle of dead-ends in his life during the 1960s and 1970s. He married in 1967 and had a child, Abigail, but left the marriage within two years. He joined Olivier’s National Theatre, but walked out of Macbeth in the middle of a matinee performance, never to return. He made a JamesBond-style movie, called When Eight Bells Toll, but abandoned popcorn movies to turn instead to epic fare like War & Peace.

Throughout the 1970s he repeatedly returned to the stage as successive movies failed. All the time, he says, he hated it: “I was already angry. I have been rebellious and angry all my life, but the insecurity of the theatre made me insane.” He started drinking heavily, but it was during this period, believes actor Roy Marsden, who shared digs with Hopkins in the 1960s, that he really honed his craft: “It was the theatre that gave him an education. It is an academic discipline and studying the texts of O’Casey and Chekhov gave shape to the villains and the good guys in his own life. I always contend that Tony became the great psychoanalyst he is in the theatre.”

The alcoholism of the 1970s also laid foundations for the Jekyll-Hyde creation of Hopkins’ ultimate breakthrough role, serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Hopkins was 54 and already six years in recovery when, he says, he “dug deep in the well to project a darker self”. He had portrayed some of history’s most controversial characters, including Hitler (in CBS’ The Bunker in 1981) and Captain Bligh (in The Bounty in 1984), but it was the part of Hannibal Lecter that was to have the widest global impact.

The Silence of the Lambs swept the boards at the Oscars. Hopkins’ fees shot to $5 million per movie and, thereafter, he was never without Hollywood offers. Some slammed The Silence of the Lambs as a celebration of evil, but Hopkins was unrepentant. “I’m grateful to Hannibal Lecter,” he says. “He got me out of the theatre. He liberated me.”

Compared with his hero, Hopkins got to enjoy a post- Oscar plateau on which Burton never really settled. And he went further in terms of being prolific and versatile, though some critics maintained the Bogie legacy was one of emotional starchiness. Even Peta Barker, Hopkins’ first wife, points out the astonishing range that the actor has displayed, moving from Merchant Ivory’s Howards End, where his emotional containment is electric, to Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, where his vampire-slayer Van Helsing bounds with energy. Add to these the romantic allure of Shadowlands, where he played C.S. Lewis as a tragic lover and the sexual magnetism of Surviving Picasso where, at almost 60, Hopkins was stripped to the waist and seen to gloat over two beautiful women physically wrestling before him for his affections and Hopkins’ diversity is clear. As playwright-director David Hare, who has directed Hopkins twice on stage, remarked in awe: “Who would ever have thought that Tony, with all his demons and troubles, could come to represent such glamour and sex appeal? If that’s not a success story, what is?”

Unquestionably, with his success, Hopkins has become reconciled with Wales. He became a fundraiser and President of the Snowdonia Appeal, and participated in acting programmes and alcoholic counselling groups. Nonetheless, there was more upheaval to come: Hopkins divorced his wife of almost 30 years, the English Jenni Lynton, assumed American citizenship in 2000 and shortly after married Columbian-born antiques dealer, Stella Arroyave. Some interpreted these developments as an abandonment of his homeland, but if anything, Wales appears to have become an even greater emotional magnet. “He has issues still to settle with Wales,” Raymond Edwards, Hopkins’ first acting coach, commented in the 1990s. “But then, what Welshman doesn’t? They’re tenacious. They don’t give up.”

There will be no media at Hopkins’ birthday bash on New Year’s Eve. Neither will there be any public discussion or analysis. But the fruits of his homecoming will be there for all to share in the work to come.

Michael Feeney Callan’s new biography of Sir Anthony Hopkins will be launched by Blake Publishing in May 2008; Beowulf opens in UK cinemas from 16 November