LOS ANGELES: Anthony Hopkins mocked Tom Cruise’s boyish enthusiasm, and admitted he had no idea what their collaboration, Mission: Impossible 2 was about, as Britain’s film industry honoured the American actor, along with Elizabeth Taylor in Beverly Hills on November 10.

Also honoured at the annual Britannia Awards hosted by the Los Angeles branch of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts were English directors Ronald Neame, famed for The Poseidon Adventure and Great Expectations, and Mike Newell, the man behind the upcoming Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Hopkins bestowed the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for excellence in film on Cruise, having declared, “I don’t actually know Tom that well.”

He recounted that when he turned up to the Australian shoot of Mission: Impossible 2, Cruise embraced him and lifted him off the ground, and asked him about the nonexistent script while eating an enormous club sandwich.

“I still don’t know what the film was about because all I remember is a whole lot of technical dialogue about a body in a suitcase,” Hopkins said.

But Hopkins praised Cruise as a pure Hollywood star in the mold of icons like James Cagney, Paul Newman and Gregory Peck.