Saddest Devotion: Sir Anthony Hopkins and Romantic love in Middle Age

by Christopher Carson (September 2025)

Part I: Eros at the Twilight Hour

In the spring of 2025, the internet turned its gaze toward an unlikely object of romantic scandal: 73-year-old former NFL coach Bill Belichick and his 24-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson. The age disparity, more than the relationship itself, became the target of ridicule across social media platforms. Belichick, famous for his strategic genius and emotional opacity, was suddenly cast not as a titan of football, but as a pathetic old man grasping at youthful affection. The public didn’t merely gawk, they jeered.

This was not the usual cultural May–December bemusement. It was something sharper: the cultural embarrassment of eros in late life. Miss Hudson certainly didn’t help her own image with her almost comically controlling behaviors. In public interviews and at UNC football games, she acted as if she were a kind of emotional dominatrix to the esteemed coach.

Such episodes are revealing not because they are exceptional, but because they lay bare a deep social code. We in the contemporary West permit love, particularly romantic love, to the young. In them, it is excused, celebrated, even sanctified. But in older adults, especially men, it is often received as comical, pathetic, or grotesque. Middle-aged longing is tolerated only when sublimated into nostalgia or irony. To the common doom-scroller on social media, middle-aged passion without self-deprecation becomes a form of delusion worthy of derision.

And yet, the lived reality contradicts this cultural script. Romantic love, what biologist Helen Fisher describes as “a motivation system” rooted in dopamine-rich regions of the brain, does not simply expire at forty-five. It persists, often with deeper complexity. And when it arises in men of a certain age, it can be, paradoxically, both more humiliating in the eyes of observers and more noble in the eyes of the experiencer. The social permission to fall in love quietly expires; but the capacity does not.

Shakespeare knew this well. In Twelfth Night, the character of Malvolio becomes the play’s comic scapegoat: not because he is evil, but because he is old, pompous, and in love. His enemies exploit his private desire for Olivia by forging a letter that leads him to debase himself publicly: yellow stockings, smiles where none are wanted, self-delusion made manifest. The prank is played for laughs. Malvolio is the steward of Olivia’s household in Twelfth Night, a man marked by puritanical austerity, hauteur born of self-control, and a thinly veiled desire to transcend his station. While the play is often read as a romantic comedy suffused with disguises and mistaken identities, the subplot involving Malvolio stands apart in tone and intrudes full-tilt sadism into the scenes of an ostensible comedy.

Shakespeare, here as everywhere, refuses to confine his explications of human experience into neat and conventional dramatic categories. When Maria and Sir Toby Belch concoct the scheme to humiliate Malvolio, they target not his tyranny or his temperance, but his capacity for hope, his belief that someone like Olivia could possibly love him. The fake letter, supposedly from Olivia, reads: “If this fall into thy hand, revolve. In my stars I am above thee; but be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.”

His sudden transformation: smiles, crossed garters, yellow stockings, is grotesque precisely because it is so sincere. He enters Olivia’s presence exuding misguided sexual confidence and is promptly rebuked and then locked away as mad. In one of the most painful lines in the play, he says: “They have laid me here in hideous darkness.” And when finally released, he says, with nearly insensate bitterness: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.”

Malvolio had, in his eyes, merely dared to love. His belief in Olivia’s affection was absurd, but it was also deeply human. The line is famously comedic, but in his voice, it is almost tragic. He is not merely deluded. He is desperate to matter. Malvolio becomes emblematic of what happens when older men dare to believe themselves still desirable in a world that has already assigned them a role. If Lear’s tragedy is that he needs to be loved too much by his daughters, then Malvolio’s is that he dares to believe a woman could love him at all.

The Coruscating Wounds of Devotion

If the Welsh actor Sir Anthony Hopkins had not played Malvolio at the Old Vic, then he ought to have. Come rack, come ruin, his film career has embodied the roles that begin with romantic repression and end in the ruination of personhood itself.

A more restrained but equally devastating example appears in The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel adapted into the 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins plays Mr. Stevens, a butler whose life of impeccable service has cost him his emotional life. His love for Miss Kenton is buried beneath professionalism, fear, and English repression. When at last he acknowledges his regret, it is too late. The pain is not in the scene: it is in the spaces between words, in the quivering stoicism of Hopkins’ jawline, or in his valedictory wave from the train car as it carries him away from Miss Kenton, in the night-rain, forever.

“Why, why, why do you always have to hide what you feel?” Miss Kenton asks. His answer is silence. Later, Stevens confesses, “In my philosophy… a man cannot call himself well-contented until he has done all he can to be of service to his employer.” The tragedy is that Stevens has done everything—except live.

The motif resurfaces, strikingly, in David Mamet’s The Edge (1997), where Hopkins again plays a man of dignity, wealth, and loneliness. As Charles Morse, he discovers that his young wife (Elle Macpherson) is having an affair with a younger man, Bob (Alec Baldwin). The betrayal is not dwelled upon. It emerges with grim inevitability, like snow. And yet, Charles does not retaliate. He risks his life to save Bob, not once, but multiple times, in their catastrophic involuntary sojourn in the Alaskan wilderness while pursued relentlessly by a predatory Kodiak grizzly bear.

Near the climax of the film, Bob, injured, desperate, and determined, decides to kill Charles. He deliberately gets drunk by the fire, both to numb his conscience and to summon courage. He tells Charles, with sickly sweetness, that it’s time to “end the suffering.” He frames it as a mercy, but of course it is a self-serving rationale to eliminate the man he envies and steal his wife.

Then, almost out of idle curiosity, Bob asks Charles (Hopkins) about his iron motivation to survive and return to Charles’ supermodel wife:

Bob: “Why is that so important to you, Charles?”

Charles: “I love her.”

That line, “I love her,” isn’t defensive or pleading. It’s almost whispered, almost plaintive.  It’s the last truth Charles offers, a truth Bob cannot comprehend. In Bob’s world, love is transactional, possessive, and laced with resentment. For Charles, love is something else: selfless, persistent, tragic, and perhaps even redemptive. That Charles tries to save Bob, both before and after this betrayal, is the real crux. His mercy is not strategic. It is existential. In Mamet’s moral universe, this act of grace lands like a quiet thunderclap. It is the moment the film declares that dignity is not dead. That love, even betrayed, can be stronger than vengeance.

Hopkins, in these roles, becomes something like a liturgical vessel for these hidden flames. Whether comic (Malvolio), tragic (Stevens), or stoic (Charles), he embodies what few dare confess: that the heart may gray more slowly than the hair.

Part II: The Agonies of Attachment

Not all love that undoes a man is romantic per se. Sometimes it is paternal, sometimes filial. Sometimes it is not eros but something adjacent: intensely emotional, possessive, sacrificial, and ultimately devastating. It burns no less brightly. And in this darker region of attachment, we find Anthony Hopkins again.  “Come we now to our darker purpose.”

In the Amazon Prime production of King Lear (2018), directed by Richard Eyre, Hopkins portrays a monarch already on the brink. Lear’s love for his daughters tips over from longing into delusion. What begins as a demand for public affirmation—“Which of you shall we say doth love us most?”—becomes a slow, brutal slide into despair and even national ruination.

When Lear later rages at his ungrateful daughter Goneril, he spits, “Thou art a boil, a plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood.” These are not the words of a merely betrayed father. They are the cries of a man whose emotional world has collapsed. His need to be loved has rendered him monstrous, then mad. Hopkins’s portrayal is reserved, almost minimal, until it isn’t. His Lear is not exactly grandiose: more wounded, or diminished. The line “I am a man more sinn’d against than sinning” is not Lear’s defense, it is his broken confession.

Hopkins delivers it with stunned disbelief, as if even now, he cannot comprehend how love could have failed him so fully. Hopkins’ Lear is undone by the intensity (and thus, blinding of his awareness, and later literal blinding) in his paternal love for his daughters, two of whom first recoil and then plot to annihilate him.

A similar structure of paternal suffering unfolds in Legends of the Fall (1994), where Hopkins plays Colonel Ludlow, a disillusioned Army officer who retreats to Montana to raise his sons in isolation. He loves them too fiercely.  His love is not cloying or soft. It is protective, tribal, and instinctive.

The cost of this wild attachment is catastrophic. Samuel dies. Tristan unravels. Alfred turns bitterly estranged. Col. Ludlow is eventually left mute by a stroke, communicating by scribbling on slips of paper. Where Lear howls, Ludlow is silent, moaning in defiance. The pain is no less. It is simply borne with the American stoicism of the Frontier.  As the narrator intones, “Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear.”

Ludlow is one such man. The bitterness between brothers culminates when Alfred shouts at Tristan, “I followed all of the rules, man’s and God’s. And you, you followed none of them. And they all loved you more.”

The Colonel might well have shouted this himself to his wayward son, Tristan (Brad Pitt).  It is Ludlow’s dilemma in miniature: the love that cannot be regulated, and the wreckage that follows.

Hopkins’s performances trace a constellation: from romantic longing in Stevens and Charles, to paternal undoing in Lear and Ludlow. These roles, taken together, form a study in emotional extremity: how deep love, in mid or late life, often leads to destruction and regret. Not because love itself is wrong, but because the world resents its undying flame in those it has decided are past their time.  We punish the aged, for fear we will become them, one gray day.

It is no small irony that Hopkins has long been estranged from his own daughter, Abigail. He has remarked with performative coldness in interviews, “I don’t know why, and I don’t care.” And yet, his roles tell a different story: one of longing, abandonment, sorrow, and endurance. Perhaps he has never played Malvolio, or perhaps he has, but he’s inhabited him again and again, in essence if not costume.

Sir Anthony once remarked, “I thought I had two lives [the actor’s life and his personal life] but in the end I had only one.” Art infuses the life and also the reverse, with Abigail and with Lear. These men—Malvolio, Stevens, Charles, Lear, Ludlow—are not fools. They are men who dared to love past the accepted hour. They were mocked, ruined and simply too late. But all of them remind us that love does not obey the clock, and neither should the dignity of those who feel it.  “Rise, Sir Anthony, and take your place as those renowned in the olden time.”