The Odd Reason Martha Stewart Ended Her Romance With Hollywood Icon Anthony Hopkins

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From homemaking icon, to jailbird, to Snoop Dogg's BFF, Martha Stewart has had quite the interesting life and career, to put it mildly. So, as you might expect, her romantic history is also rather intriguing. For just shy of 30 years, the legendary star was married to publisher Andrew Stewart, with the two divorcing at the turn of the 1990s. Not too long after, Stewart began a 15-year, on-and-off relationship with tech billionaire Charles Simonyi, which ended for good in 2008. But perhaps the most bizarre chapter in the A-lister's love story involves a short-lived fling with Anthony Hopkins, which she broke off for a strange reason.

The unlikely couple reportedly began seeing each other in 1990 — the very same year her divorce was finalized, and a couple of years before Stewart started dating Simonyi. Then, in 1991, Hopkins graced the silver screen in what arguably remains his most famous role to date, as Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence of the Lambs." Little did he realize, though, that said role would also mark the end of the actor's romance with the TV personality. Martha Stewart dumped Anthony Hopkins after watching the horror movie, as it became difficult for her to separate Hopkins from the cannibalistic serial killer he portrayed onscreen.

"I have a big, scary house in Maine that's way by itself on the hundred acres in the forest. And I couldn't even imagine taking Anthony Hopkins there," Stewart explained on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" in 2022. She elaborated, "I couldn't, 'cause all I could think of was him eating, you know..." We're going to go out on a limb and say the actor offering to bring over some fava beans and a nice Chianti probably wouldn't have changed her mind.

Anthony Hopkins may have lost Martha Stewart thanks to Hannibal Lecter, but the role notably earn the esteemed actor his first Academy Award for Best Actor. Talk about a consolation prize! Hopkins went on to reprise it twice; in 2001's "Hannibal," and in "Red Dragon" the following year. The star-making role was subsequently taken over by the late Gaspard Ulliel in the 2007 origin story "Hannibal Rising," and then by Mads Mikkelsen in the hit 2013 TV reimagining "Hannibal," which ran for three seasons. 

Just like Hannibal Lecter's legacy, Hopkins' love life has endured too. Curiously, his early-1990s fling with Stewart took place while he was technically still married to second wife Jennifer Lynton, whom the Oscar winner married in 1973. In his 2025 memoir, "We Did OK, Kid," Hopkins admitted to repeatedly cheating on Lynton, acknowledging, "She deserved better than me." The "Remains of the Day" star and Lynton formally divorced in 2002, and the British actor quickly got remarried, to third wife Stella Arroyave, in 2003. 

The two have been together ever since, and Hopkins even credits Arroyave with helping him get his troubled personal life back on track. "My wife, Stella — a beautiful woman. She's brought a lot of peace to my life, a lot of wisdom," he gushed to The Telegraph in 2011. "I learnt from her to just take life as it comes. So I live my life in non-expectation."