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     In the elevator on the way up to Anthony Hopkins' hotel suite, I am trying to remember what he looked like in The Elephant Man or in 84 Charing Cross Road. But I have made a dreadful error and re-watched The Silence of the Lambs this morning, and all I can conjure in my mind's eye is Hopkins as the wicked Hannibal Lecter, who terrified audiences worldwide this past year when Silence was released.

     When I knock on the door, it swings open. "Please come in," yells a voice from within the room. I peer in cautiously. The man who comes striding towards me is far more handsome than he has ever appeared on screen. His white hair is thick and unruly, his black suit and crisp striped shirt appear to be custom-made. And Anthony Hopkins has the most extraordinary smile.

     

     But none of that really matters, because I have worked myself into a mini-frenzy, convinced that Hopkins will cross over into his creation and eat a part of me for breakfast. At that very instant, he suggests that we have some food sent up. I make a counterproposal that we go down to the coffee shop.Hopkins looks perplexed, but grudgingly--and graciously--agrees. Once setled, he orders orange juice, mineral water and coffee. "Thank God, it's not liver and fava beans," I say, referring to his famous off-screen meal in The Silence of the Lambs. A wicked gleam comes into his eyes. "Oh yes," he says shaking his head in that Hannibal Lecter way, "and a nice chianti." His tongue lolls around in his mouth, and I am at once fascinated and repulsed, very much the way Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling reacted in Silence. When Hopkins reaches over to wipe a piece of muffin off my face, I nearly bolt out of the booth. Taking in my discomfort, he breaks into a laugh. "Relax Martha" he says with his wonderful Welsh accent. "I haven't eaten anyone for weeks."

     This is Anthony Hopkins' year. The Silence of the Lambs has done for him what scores of movies before failed to do: he is now a household name. "Three or four years ago, I had given up on ever being an American movie star," he says. "But since Silence came out, it's been wild: I am approached by kids that have seen it five, six, seven times. Now... who knows?"

     Who knows indeed. Hopkins' portrayal of Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter is one of the most devastatingly grotesque and seductive roles to appear onscreen. Since Silence, Hopkins has worked nonstop. He can be seen in Spotswood, a small Australian film in which he plays a prissy efficiency expert who is baffled by the incompetence he sees around him; Howards End, the beautiful Merchant-Ivory film in which he plays Henry Wilcox, an Edwardian caught in the currents of his time; and Freejack, which has him paired with Emilio Estevez and Mick Jagger. He is in Los Angeles now working on what he says is one of the most exciting projects he's been involved with: Bram Stoker's Dracula, directed by the legendary Francis Ford Coppola.

     "It's quite a story how I got this role," he says. "I owe it all to Winona Ryder. After Godfather III, Coppola called Winona to say that he really wanted to work with her and that he had something for her to see. And she said, 'Good, because there's something that I want you to see.' And she brought him Dracula. After he read it, he asked if she had any ideas for casting, and she mentioned me as Dr. Van Helsing. Yesterday, Winona brought her answering machine to the set and I re-did her message as Hannibal Lecter!"

     Hopkins cannot believe his good fortune. But anyone who has witnessed his incredible career (from his debut as Katharine Hepburn's son in The Lion in Winter to Magic toThe Elephant Man to Silence, with countless other roles in between) can.

     Once an outspoken critic of directors, age and good fortune have tempered him. "I used to be very intolerant of directors, had no patience with them or what they needed. But now I see them in a new light. I've worked with great directors: Jonathan Demme, James Ivory, Coppola. They're all very different: Ivory is a gentleman, a little remote, but very gracious. Coppola is a genius. He changes his mind a lot, improvises all the time, and it makes you stay on your toes, You think the whole thing is reeling out of control, and then, boom, he brings it back to the central part of the script."

     And on the day that we sit chatting, Orion, the studio that released The Silence of the Lambs, has started a campaign of ads hoping to get Hopkins a nomination for Best Actor. The fifty-four-year-old Hopkins knows that this might be risky: he would have been a shoe-in for the Best Supporting Oscar, but both he and the studio felt that his role as Lecter was anything but supporting.

     And what if he isn't nominated?

     Hopkins tries to look humble. "If I don't get nominated," he says, "I'll feel..." A slow grin crosses his face, and he gives up the unasumming pose. "I'll feel awful. Dreadful. But I'll get up the next morning, and go to work. Because the work is everything."

     Meanwhile, author Tom Harris is working on the sequel to Silence, which is expected to reunite Hopkins and Jodie Foster with director Jonathan Demme. "He's not quick," says Hopkins, referring to Harris. "We should get it at the end of the year. We have no idea what's it's going to be like. Harris has never seen the movie. His daughter saw it and reported back to him that it was good."

     I wonder aloud if it's possible that Clarice Starling will be absent from the sequel.

     "Well," reflects Hopkins, "I guess it is a possibility. That could be. But don't you think she'd want to hook up with Lecter again?" Hopkins gives me his best smile.

     The only response that seems appropriate is a lurching in my stomach.