The Father

Florian Zeller's The Father won two awards at the 93rd Academy Awards in April 2021. Anthony Hopkins took Best Actor, his second Oscar, thirty years after The Silence of the Lambs, and at eighty-three became the oldest acting winner in the history of the prize; Zeller and Christopher Hampton won Best Adapted Screenplay. Both wins were repeated at the BAFTAs, where Hopkins took the equivalent award and Zeller and Hampton the screenplay prize. The film had six Oscar nominations in all, including Best Picture and Best Director.

It adapts Zeller's own 2012 stage play Le Père, one of the most internationally successful French plays of the 2010s: it has been performed in more than forty-five countries and staged in the West End and on Broadway, where Frank Langella won the Tony Award for Best Actor in 2016. Zeller had never directed professionally before, on stage or on film, and The Father is his feature debut. It is rare for a forty-one-year-old playwright to lead an Oscar-winning production from his first script.

Hopkins is joined by Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Olivia Williams, Imogen Poots and Rufus Sewell, and Colman was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at both the Oscars and the BAFTAs. Ben Smithard shot it and Ludovico Einaudi wrote the score. Zeller followed it in 2022 with a companion film, The Son, starring Hugh Jackman; the third part of the loose Mother / Father / Son stage trilogy has not been filmed.