Hannibal Lecter

Last thursday NBC broadcast the first episode of Hannibal starring Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal Lecter's character has been created in 1981 by Thomas Harris in Red dragon, and appeared in The silence of the lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal's rising (2006).
From my point of view, only Red dragon and The silence of the lambs are good novels, the others are much weaker.

The first actor to play Lecter (Lektor in the film) was Brian Cox in 1986 in Michael Mann's excellent adaptation of Red Dragon, Manhunter. But Mann (like Harris) focus more on Will Graham's character, a FBI profiler, and on a serial killer called The tooth fairy.

 

Brian Cox

The second movie featuring Hannibal Lecter, also as a secondary character, is Jonathan Demme's The silence of the lambs, in 1991, from Harris' second novel. This time Anthony Hopkins plays Lecter, differently from Brian Cox, maybe more exhuberant and ironic, making his character kind of attractive. 

 

Anthony Hopkins

The movie is successful and will lead to three very needless film adaptations of Hannibal, Red dragon and Hannibal's rising, featuring again Anthony Hopkins in Ridley Scott's Hannibal (2001), Brett Ratner's awful Red dragon (2002), and Gaspard Ulliel in Peter Webber's Hannibal's uprising (2007).

Gaspard Ulliel

From what I saw, the better performance as Hannibal Lecter might be Mads Mikkelsen's, he seems to give him a dark side and a sophistication Cox and Hopkins lacked...