7. John Harvey Kellogg
Hopkins donned an impressive moustache, and for some reason a set of false, enlarged teeth to play the cereal inventing, sex-avoiding vegetarian John Harvey Kellogg in 1994's The Road To Wellville, playing yet another larger than life character with an irresistible back story and enough depth and intrigue to let him really get his teeth into the role.
How They Really LookedHopkins' Version
Hopkins' Kellogg was a grotesque, played for some laughs with a physicality that in some ways matched the ravings of his teachings on sex and abstinence - in particular the assertion that masturbation should be dealt with in young boys through unanaesthetised circumcision or genital mutilation for both sexes. Seems a bit drastic. Again, no amount of comedy facial ornaments can hide the very distinctive look of Hopkins' "real" face, and the effect is more akin to him playing around with the fancy dress rather than embodying a character, who according to most other photographs didn't appear to have intrusively over-sized teeth. Still, a very under-rated performance. And then there's that mentioned exception when Hopkins nailed the look of the character, a little too scarily...
The Exception
Not entirely sure it's something to brag about, but Hopkins' performance as Hitler in the probably little-seen TV biopic The Bunker from 1981, which followed the events of the last weeks of Hitler's life was matched with a chillingly accurate physical transformation, which clearly showed the actor's potential to play unhinged madmen, as he would so wonderfully in Silence of the Lambs. These are by no means the only real-life figures Hopkins has played in his rich and diverse career - over the decades he has worked, he has also performed as David Lloyd George (three times), Charles Dickens and Bruno Richard Hauptmann (the Lindbergh baby murderer). And he looked like none of them, probably. Clearly undeterred by this fact, directors have also cast Hopkins as Othello (a Moorish - i.e. "dark-skinned" character) and Quasimodo. A man of many faces, you might say, if it wasn't for the fact that they all looked just like his.