REVEALED: Why Anthony Hopkins and his daughter have barely spoken in twenty years

  • Sir Anthony Hopkins has not spoken to his only child Abigail for two decades
  • Such is their estrangement that he does not even know if he is a grandfather
  • The Oscar winning actor who lives in California said he ‘didn’t care’ about the family split, admitting that he was ‘cold’ about his 48-year-old daughter

  • The striking sapphire-blue eyes, fine bone structure and almost spectrally pale skin all leave no doubt that the pair are father and daughter.
    Pictured together on the red carpet, Sir Anthony Hopkins, 80, and his only child, Abigail, now 48, look loving and relaxed in each other’s company.
    In one pose, both are laughing, their noses crinkled in exactly the same spot. She cocks her head towards him, while he wraps an arm fondly round her waist. In another shot, he is the proud father, pointing towards her — as if deflecting the spotlight from himself.

    Veteran actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, 80, has not spoken to daughter Abigail – his only child – for two decades (pictured together at a film premiere in 1991)

    Veteran actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, 80, has not spoken to daughter Abigail – his only child – for two decades (pictured together at a film premiere in 1991)

    Sir Anthony said he ‘didn’t care’ about the family split, admitting that he was ‘cold’ about his 48-year-old daughter, who uses the name Abigail Harrison (pictured together in the 1970s)

    Sir Anthony said he ‘didn’t care’ about the family split, admitting that he was ‘cold’ about his 48-year-old daughter, who uses the name Abigail Harrison (pictured together in the 1970s)

    But this photograph — the last of the two together — was taken 27 years ago, when Abigail was just 21.
    And even then, it was far from the portrait of familial affection it seemed. The Oscar-winning Welsh actor is renowned for putting on a good show, after all.
    For behind the scenes he and Abigail, now a singer-songwriter and acting coach, have had a fractured and acrimonious relationship for almost the entirety of her life. Despite a brief rapprochement in the Nineties, when she had roles in two of Sir Anthony’s films — Shadowlands and The Remains Of The Day, both in 1993 — the pair have barely spoken for two decades and remain bitterly estranged.
    In fact, so absent are relations between the two that, in an extraordinary callous remark, Sir Anthony admitted he didn’t know whether Abigail had any children — and didn’t care.
    Asked by the Radio Times this week whether or not he was a grandfather, he replied: ‘I don’t have any idea. People break up. Families split and, you know: “Get on with your life.” People make choices. I don’t care one way or the other.’
    Sir Anthony — who, with some irony, stars in the BBC’s forthcoming adaptation of King Lear, a Shakespearean villain famously driven mad by his fraught relationship with his daughters — also admitted that he didn’t have any idea where his daughter lived.

    Veteran actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, 80, has not spoken to daughter Abigail – his only child – for two decades
    Veteran actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, 80, has not spoken to daughter Abigail – his only child – for two decades
    ‘You don’t have to like your family. Children don’t like their fathers. You don’t have to love each other.’ When told that his remarks sounded rather cold, he said: ‘Well, it is cold. Because life is cold.’
    Friends say Abigail, who lives in London, will be deeply upset by her father’s heartless comments — even after so many years of animosity. ‘She is still very hurt by the whole thing,’ one says. ‘Her relationship with him — or the lack of it — has had a big impact on her life.

    The pair briefly reconnected in the 1990s and she appeared in two of his films, Shadowlands and The Remains Of The Day
    The pair briefly reconnected in the 1990s and she appeared in two of his films, Shadowlands and The Remains Of The Day
    ‘Every time she tries to move on, she sees him — on film posters, on TV, on the sides of buses. He’s not like any other father. Even though they live on opposite sides of the Atlantic — [Sir Anthony has lived in Los Angeles since 1974] — he is impossible to escape. He has caused her a lot of pain.’
    That pain started tragically early in Abigail’s life. The daughter of Sir Anthony and English actress Petronella Barker, his first wife, whom he met on stage and married in 1966, she was born in 1969. Cracks had begun to appear in the marriage after just two months and, according to Hopkins’s biographer Quentin Falk, news of Petronella’s pregnancy made him ‘so tense he was like a bottle of soda that was about to explode’.
    Abigail’s birth didn’t save the marriage — far from it. Already successful on the stage (Sir Anthony had a breakthrough as Laurence Olivier’s understudy in 1967 and joined the Royal National Theatre in London), he began spending long periods away from home and turned to drink to cope with his mounting workload.
    His addiction soon spiralled, with reports he was working his way through a bottle of tequila a day. He insists this is exaggerated. ‘I was never falling-down-in-the-gutter drunk,’ he has said. ‘Rather, I’d get boring, aggressive and stupid.’

    In a 2005 interview, Sir Anthony admitted he was at the ‘height of my self-destructive behaviour’ at the time.
    ‘I was arrogant and I was out of it because I was so scared,’ he said. ‘I see young kids today freak out, and I suppose I was like that.
    ‘I thought I knew it all, so my relationship with theatre companies and directors was pretty rocky. I drank too much and nearly damaged my health and my life.’
    In fact, it was because of alcohol that he met his second wife, Jenni Lynton, a secretary at Pinewood Studios, who was asked to collect the actor from Heathrow airport after he got so drunk that he missed a flight in 1970.
    Short-tempered, irascible and — in his own words — ‘deeply unbalanced’, he walked out on his wife and 14- month-old baby the following year, and married Jenni in 1973.
    Unsurprisingly, future contact between Sir Anthony and Petronella was intermittent at best. Abigail, growing up in Putney, South-West London, with her mother, says she has no real memories of life as a family.
    ‘I would see him, but maybe once a year,’ she revealed in a 2005 interview, her only one on the subject to date. ‘There is a little bit of sadness, but I have to get on with my life. It has always been like that. See him, and then not.’
    As Sir Anthony’s profile grew, he and Jenni decided to move to America, where they settled in Los Angeles, carving an even greater chasm between himself and his only child.
    His drinking escalated, and he began to go on vodka and tequila binges, later admitting to hallucinating and, on one occasion, waking up in a hotel in Phoenix, Arizona, with no recollection of how he’d got there. ‘I had never been around anyone who drank like him,’ Jenni said in a 2004 interview.
    ‘We’d go out to dinner and he’d order a bottle of wine. Before we got half-way through, he’d order another. If we went to a party, he never wanted to come home.’

    In 1975, he finally came to his senses — and gave up alcohol for good.
    Back in London, Abigail was growing ever more distant from her father. ‘She never forgave him for the way he treated her mother,’ a friend explains. ‘She blamed him for his lack of love and kindness and she never got over that.
    ‘She felt that he had abandoned them while he went off to Hollywood to make a name for himself. Even when he was in contact, he was never really “there”.

    ‘He always wanted to be somebody else, to be on stage. He didn’t like reality. Unfortunately that meant he didn’t really like being a husband or a father either.’
    There were, even then, similarities between the two. Abigail, who describes herself as a ‘solitary child’, found solace in music — first the piano and then, from the age of seven, the guitar, a love she inherited from her father.
    Before he became an actor, Sir Anthony — who has composed several pieces of music — trained to be a concert pianist. ‘It’s all in the genes,’ Abigail has said. ‘There have been more than a few parallels.’
    In 1985, when she was 16, she and her father had a major row, reportedly over his treatment of her mother, now 75, to whom she has always been fiercely loyal.
    Two years later, while studying English at the University of East Anglia, Abigail suffered a breakdown — something she attributed to their troubled relationship. ‘I bottled up so much emotion in my childhood, it caused my mind to go,’ she told an interviewer. ‘I came very close to killing myself. It was the worst time I can remember. I totally abused my mind and body.
    ‘The root cause was the fact that my father and I had an intermittent relationship when I was young. I was angry and there was a lot of grieving going on.’
    Later, in 2005, she backtracked, insisting she did not try to kill herself. ‘It was a relatively short addiction,’ she insisted. ‘A six-month spell that a lot of 18-year-olds go through — amphetamines, booze. It was a depressing time. I think some of that is genetic.’
    Her father, meanwhile, was battling demons of his own. One night in 1982, he told Jenni he was going for a drive — and decamped to a house in the mountains, where he stayed for five months. Jenni moved back to London, while he had an affair with Joyce Ingalls, an actress and model he met at Alcoholics Anonymous (though the couple’s unconventional marriage would continue, long-distance, until 2002). Next, he threatened to give up acting, before moving to a New Age haven in the desert, where he lived as a penniless hippy for two months.
    Somehow, amidst his chaotic existence, his acting continued to flourish, with roles opposite Shirley MacLaine, Mel Gibson and Emma Thompson throughout the Eighties and Nineties.
    It was in 1990 that his daughter, who had decided to go into acting herself, got in touch. Then going by the name Abigail Harrison, an attempt to distance herself from her famous roots, she decided it was time to build bridges.
    Sir Anthony described their meeting after so many years as ‘earth-shattering’ — and went on to persuade directors to give her cameo roles in Shadowlands, the C.S. Lewis biopic, and novel adaptation The Remains Of The Day. Reportedly, he also bought Abigail a flat to help her get on her feet.
    She said acting alongside him was ‘a bonding as well as an educational experience’, but admitted they barely spoke on set. ‘He kept himself to himself, and I kept myself to myself,’ she said.
    As her career blossomed her father, by then an American citizen, would slip quietly into theatres up and down the country to watch her on stage whenever he was in the UK.
    But old arguments soon reared their head. The truce proved temporary, visits dwindled — and in 2001 communication between the pair ceased completely.
    The following year, Sir Anthony appeared on a U.S. radio show pleading for his daughter to get in touch. ‘I guess we are estranged,’ he said. ‘I don’t think she wants to know very much. I hope she is well. I hope she is OK.
    ‘The divorce with her mother was a long time ago. She has probably got good reasons. She is too busy and all that. She has to do her own thing. I think she is in England somewhere. Wherever you are Abigail, I wish you luck.’
    He sounded sincere, but Abigail — who moved into the music industry and set up her own record label in 2003 — may well have seen echoes of a man who, despite his protestations, seemed unable to change his ways. By now twice-divorced and proclaiming himself ‘not good at any kind of relationship with people’, he was soon getting married again, this time to Stella Arroyave — a Columbian antiques-dealer-turned-actress 18 years his junior — in 2003.
    Unlike his two previous marriages, this one seems to be lasting the course. Sir Anthony has praised Stella for helping him put his ‘wild ways’ behind him, and in 2013 the pair celebrated their ten-year wedding anniversary with a blessing in his native Pembrokeshire — a ceremony to which Abigail did not receive an invitation.
    Over the years, he has blamed his volatile personal relationships on a number of things: a difficult upbringing (he reportedly hated boarding school, which deprived him of ‘any idea of family loyalty’); bullying (classmates nicknamed him ‘Mad Hopkins’) and, most recently, being diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, a neurological condition which affects social interaction.
    ‘As a child, I was very isolated and I’ve never really been close to anyone,’ he said in a 2012 interview. ‘Ask nothing, expect nothing. That’s my creed.

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