A few hundred meters from Beverly Hills, nestled in the greenery of palm trees and jacarandas that pierce here and there, the bluish glow of its swimming pools, the Bel-Air hotel, on Stone Canyon Road, in Los Angeles, is , according to the palace’s website, an “exclusive oasis”.
It was there that one morning in July 2017, Florian Zeller, reputed to be “the most performed French playwright in the world”, met Anthony Hopkins for the first time. He is accompanied by his screenwriter, Christopher Hampton. So at the threshold of his 80e year, the interpreter, Oscar winner in 1992 for his role of Hannibal Lecter in Thesilenceofthelambs, made an appointment with this young Frenchy to whom everything succeeds, after the latter had sent him the film adaptation of his play, The father, created in Paris in 2012 with Robert Hirsch. The Father competes today in six categories at the Oscars, which will be awarded Sunday, April 25.
Zeller knows what Hopkins means to the movies. He has seen almost all of his films. Not sure the reverse is true for Zeller’s pieces. Not a day goes by (apart from a pandemic, of course) without one of his works being performed on a continent. The mother (another piece which, with The son and The father, constitutes a trilogy opportunely published by Gallimard in 2019) was edited in New York with Isabelle Huppert.
The Interallie at 25
Son of a French mother and an Austrian father, raised by his grandmother in Brittany, Zeller won the Interallié in his third novel, The fascination of the worst (Flammarion, 2004), at 25 years old. Influenced by Kundera, Salinger and Pinter, he taught at Sciences Po Paris after having been a student. Jean d’Ormesson offered to be his protector in the world of letters and the underworld of Parisian publishing. He was a columnist on a hip TV show. He is married to an actress. His life seems to have known nothing but success.
Going through the typed pages of the script, l‘actor born in 1937 in Port Talbot, Wales, who has taken on all roles in theater, film or television, is enthusiastic. He knows the potential of this character sinking in the twists and turns of senile dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, lost in the labyrinth of time, unbearable and pitiful. He was not oblivious to the author’s little attention, who changed the first name, André, from the initial play, to Anthony. Tribute? A sustained attempt at seduction? Or (already) a director’s bias?
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