and wrote the musical score. The film was not a success, and critics for the most part complained that it lacked Chekov's sense of the comedic, that Hopkins infused the story with too much bleakness. He was back in critics' good graces the following year by virtue of his commanding Oscar-nominated supporting turn as former U.S. President John Quincy Adams in director Steven Spielberg's slave-ship revolt drama, Amistad.

The 1998 film The Mask of Zorro paired Hopkins with another actor known for his volcanic temperament: flamboyant Latin heartthrob Antonio Banderas. The Richard Rodriguez-directed interpretation of the legendary swordsmith's tale found Hopkins portraying the aging mentor Zorro to Banderas' younger incarnation of the romantic rebel hero with the roguish rapier. Next up came a role alongside another heartthrob, in theperson of his Legends of the Fall co-star Brad Pitt, in Meet Joe Black, a painfully long remake of Death Takes a Holiday. No better was the Jon Turteltaub thriller Instinct, the laughable chronicle of an anthropologist who spent years living among the mountain gorillas of Africa.

The 60-plus-year-old actor has led a predictably morose and unsettled private life, and retains a tempestuous discontentment typical of artists and some eccentric habits to show for it. Wed briefly to Petronella Barker (with whom he had a daughter, Abigail, born in 1968) in the '60s, he married his present wife, Jennifer Lynton, in 1973. He fortunately gave up booze two years later, after waking up in a Phoenix hotel room with the mother of all hangovers and no recollection of how