'The contender was Chadwick Boseman, so I went to bed': Sir Anthony Hopkins reveals the REAL reason he didn't show up to collect his Best Actor Oscar as he admits 'I didn't expect it'

Sir Antony Hopkins made headlines in April after he failed to show up at The Oscars to collect the Best Actor gong he was awarded for his appearance in The Father.

But speaking on Lorraine on Tuesday, the iconic actor, 83, revealed that he 'didn't expect' to win, explaining: 'The contender was Chadwick Boseman, so I went to bed.'

Appearing alongside The Father director Florian Zeller, the screen star continued: 'Well what happened very briefly: I didn't expect to get it, at all. My phone went, and it was a text from my agent saying "you've won the Oscar" at about 5 o'clock in the morning.'

He added: 'I couldn't believe it. I really couldn't believe it. I didn't expect it.'

Hopkins - who didn't give his acceptance speech until he woke up the next morning - went on: 'The next morning I made a little speech of thanks to the Academy and Chadwick Boseman.'

Reiterating his surprise, he once again told Lorraine, 61: 'I really didn't expect it. It was a shock.'    

Sir Anthony became the oldest actor ever win an Oscar for his heart-wrenching performance as a man with dementia in The Father. 

However, he skipped the awards show, held in Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, California, and didn't give his acceptance speech until waking up the next morning near Port Talbot.   

In his April speech, he paid tribute to the late Chadwick, who many expected to win the gong for his performance in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.  

Boseman died at the age of 43 in August after a private four-year battle with colon cancer.

After his no-show win, Sir Anthony shared a late acceptance video on Monday morning from Wales as he admitted that he 'really did not expect' his win.

Speaking in a short clip surrounded by sprawling Welsh countryside, Sir Anthony said: 'Good morning, here I am in my homeland of Wales and at 83-years-of-age I did not expect to get this award. I really didn't. 

'I am grateful to the Academy and thank you. I want to pay tribute to Chadwick Boseman who was taken from us far too early, and again, thank you all very much. I really did not expect this, so I feel very privileged and honoured. Thank you.'    

The star missed the Hollywood ceremony weeks after also dodging the Bafta Awards, deciding to paint in his hotel room instead. He only learned he had won Best Actor at Britain's top film awards because of yelling and banging through the walls. 

Just before his win he tweeted a video of himself in a South Wales graveyard visiting his baker father's tombstone. The actor wrote: 'Richard Hopkins, my beloved father, resting in eternal peace...' and recited Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, but couldn't finish the words after becoming overcome with emotion saying: 'God, I can't do it, it's too painful'. 

Sir Anthony said that his father Richard, who died in 1981, had inspired parts of his Oscar-winning performance. 

Hopkins won his first Academy Award in March 1992 for his chilling portrayal of serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs, dedicating it to his father who had died exactly 11 years earlier 'to the night'.

He said of one scene in The Father where he rows with his daughter Anne, played by Olivia Colman: 'What struck me was my own father was in me. I'm always on to her, nagging at her (Anne). My father was like that as he was dying, because he was frightened. He was afraid. Not mean, just irascible, scared. And it's painful to see that. And you think of the hopelessness, the emptiness, the sadness of it all, and knowing none of us get out of this alive.'

Film fans hailed this year's Oscars ceremony as the 'wokest ever'.

Award host Regina King had kicked off the night by hailing the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, director Travon Free showed off a jacket emblazoned with the named of black people killed by police on the red carpet and Mia Neal then spoke about 'breaking the glass ceiling' for trans and minority ethnic people in her acceptance speech for best hair and makeup. 

After years of criticism over racial diversity, Chloe Zhao then become the first Asian woman and only the second woman ever to win best director for Nomadland, British actor Daniel Kaluuya won best supporting actor for Judas and the Black Messiah, and 73-year-old South Korean Youn Yuh-jung won best supporting actress for Minari.

Many then figured that the night would end with a posthumous award for Boseman, after the 'best actor' category was switched to last in the billing instead of the traditional 'best picture'.

But instead the award went to Hopkins, who broke the record for oldest best actor winner at 83 for his portrayal of a man with dementia in The Father.

 Hopkins played opposite fellow Oscar-winner Olivia Colman in the £18million drama, which critics have likened to a horror film for its compelling depiction of dementia and the toll it takes.

Hollywood 'bible' Variety called Hopkins 'brilliant and mercurial' as the movie unfolds through the confused and fearful eyes of a man who rails against his daughter's attempts to put him in a care home.

Hopkins has often spoken about drawing on his own turbulent family history to infuse his best-known roles, including the inwardly raging butler in The Remains Of The Day and last year's Oscar-nominated turn as conservative Pope Benedict XVI in The Two Popes. 

There has certainly been no shortage of personal drama to draw upon for, in real life, Hopkins has been estranged from his own daughter Abigail, a 52-year-old singer and acting coach, for more than two decades.

It is a subject so sensitive, Hopkins refuses to discuss it with even his closest friends. And an attempt to explain the situation publicly two years ago backfired so badly he has vowed never to talk about her in interviews again.

'Anyone in Tony's orbit knows to never mention the subject,' a friend told The Mail on Sunday. 'Tony was plagued by demons for years but he's in a very good place now and this is not a wound he wants to reopen, particularly not in public.'

Born in Wales, the soft-spoken Hopkins is the son of a baker whose career has seen him playing characters ranging from the late U.S. President Richard Nixon to artist Pablo Picasso, Pope Benedict and director Alfred Hitchcock.

But Hopkins - who has been living in Wales during the pandemic - says his first love was music and that he came to acting as a profession by accident. He is also an accomplished pianist and artist who has lived for years in California.  

Speaking just after his Bafta win he said: 'I'm just so astounded.

'I'm sitting here in my hotel room covered in paint and this cheer went up from next door - I thought, ''Are they watching a football match?'''

It was at that point he received a message from Florian Zeller, the film's director, telling him he'd been named Best Actor.

'I never expected to get this, you know.

'I mean, I got to a point in my life where I thought, ''I wonder if I will ever work again'' - an actor's nightmare.'

Hopkins has a six-decade film, TV and stage career, but is perhaps best known for playing the brilliant but twisted murderer Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 thriller 'The Silence of the Lambs,' for which he won his first Oscar.

His best lead actor win in April made him the oldest actor to get an Academy Award, an honour previously held by the late Christopher Plummer.

In The Father Hopkins plays an aging man who has refused any help from his family and who is beginning to doubt what is real and what is imagined. It is adapted from a 2012 stage play of the same name.

Hopkins told Variety that playing the role 'made me very aware now how precious life is.'

He was made a knight by Queen Elizabeth in 1993, giving him the formal title Sir Anthony Hopkins. 

Born to Richard, a baker, and mother Muriel, the actor struggled to bond with a father who once told him: 'You have a big head like Dumbo. Pity there's nothing inside it.' In contrast, he remained devoted to his mother until her death in 2003, even moving her to America to live with him.

'I was quiet because I was such a dummy,' Hopkins said. 'My father was a very meat-and-potatoes man. He wasn't a cruel man. And I loved him. But he was a pretty tough character. His own father was even tougher, one of those Victorians, hard as iron. But my dad was tough enough.

'It's in my DNA. I think I inherited the toughness of my father. I've mellowed over the years but I know what that's about, the harshness and the hardness.

'I've got it in me somewhere. I don't like small talk. I'm not a very cuddly, touchy-feely person. As a child, I was very isolated.

'Ask nothing, expect nothing. That's my creed.'

A chance encounter with Port Talbot's only other famous actor, Richard Burton, inspired Hopkins to head to drama school and launch his career in repertory theatre, where he met his first wife, actress Petronella Barker, Abigail's mother.

The pair wed in 1966 and Hopkins got his big break the following year when he was spotted by Laurence Olivier and joined the National Theatre in London.

According to biographer Quentin Falk, Hopkins began spending long periods of time away from home and increasingly turned to alcohol to numb the pain of a marriage that was now crumbling under the pressure.

The relationship was all but over by the time Petronella announced she was pregnant with Abigail – who was born in 1969 – claims Falk, and the news he was to become a father 'made him so tense he was like a bottle of soda that was about to pop'.

The following year, Hopkins met his second wife Jenni Lynton, a secretary, when she was sent to collect him from Heathrow Airport after he got so drunk he missed his flight.

Hopkins quit drinking shortly after Christmas 1975 after waking up in a hotel room in Arizona surrounded by empty tequila bottles with no idea how he had ended up hundreds of miles from home.

Newly sober, he tried to make amends with his child.

'They had a sporadic relationship,' the friend told The Mail on Sunday. 'But it was very much on and off and then it was more off than on until one day it was totally off.

Hopkins, who by this time had become a US citizen, divorced Jenni and married his third wife Stella, 18 years his junior, whom he met when he visited her antiques store.