The little boy, on whose haplessness the older Hopkins never tires of insisting (local kids, he says, used to taunt him as “Elephant Head”), was born on New Year’s Eve, 1937, in Margam, a suburb of Port Talbot, in South Wales. Port Talbot was—and still is, just about—a steel town, but the Hopkins family were bakers. A silver cup bearing the legend “Arthur Richard Hopkins 1924, First Prize for Currant Buns” remains in the possession of Arthur’s grandson Anthony, to go with the gold-plated Oscars that he won for “The Father” and, in 1992, for his performance as Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.” One likes to think that the fastidious Lecter, whom Hopkins went on to play, to decreasing effect, in “Hannibal” (2001) and “Red Dragon” (2002), would consider bun-based excellence to be as laudable as the butchering of mortal flesh.