Where did Hannibal Lecter grow up?

Search: hannibal lecter

Why: Silence of the Lambs was the first DVD I owned, and I have watched Hannibal many times, too, including the day after my 18th birthday and right now. And Red Dragon a few times, too. Lecter's accent is kind of... muddled, no? Anthony Hopkins is Welsh.

I never watched the prequel Hannibal Rising because Hopkins was not in it. (I never read any of the books.)

Answer: Lithuania! but he lived all over. According to Hannibal Rising - novel (2006) and screenplay both written by Lecter creator Thomas Harris:

The story explains that Lecter is born into an aristocratic family in Lithuania in 1933, and that he and his little sister Mischa are orphaned in 1944 when invading German and Soviet forces storm the family estate. Shortly thereafter, Lecter and Mischa are captured by a band of Nazi deserters, who murder and cannibalize Mischa before her brother's eyes. The death of his beloved sister is extremely traumatic for Lecter, rendering him temporarily mute and sparking his fixation with cannibalism.

Lecter escapes from the deserters and takes up residence in an orphanage until he is adopted by his uncle Robert and his Japanese wife, Lady Murasaki. As Lecter grows into a young man, he forms a close pseudo-romantic relationship with the widowed Murasaki and shows great intellectual aptitude, entering medical school at a young age. During this period, he receives tutelage in the Japanese Martial Art of Kenjutsu by Murasaki, who descended from a house of Hiroshima Samurai. Despite his seemingly comfortable life, Lecter is consumed by a savage obsession with avenging Mischa's death.

After gaining his first taste of murder (punishing the racist butcher by slaying him with Murasaki's Katana for publicly insulting her ethnicity), Lecter methodically tracks down, tortures and murders each of the men who ate his sister, in the process forsaking his relationship with Murasaki and seemingly losing all traces of his humanity.

The novel ends with Lecter being accepted into the Johns Hopkins Medical Center. He enters Canada and kills the last of the deserters, a taxidermist, and is delivered to Johns Hopkins in the United States via train.

Source: Wikipedia

The More You Know: Author Thomas Harris was born in Jackson, TN (home of Casey Jones Village) and grew up in Mississippi.

Thomas Harris has given few interviews, and has never explained where he got inspiration for Hannibal Lecter, but in a documentary for Hannibal Rising, Lecter's early murders were said by the filmmakers to be based on murders that Harris had covered when he was a crime scene reporter in the 1960s.

In 1992, Harris also paid a visit to the ongoing trials of Pietro Pacciani, who was suspected of being the serial killer nicknamed the "Monster of Florence." Parts of the killer's M.O. were used as reference for the novel Hannibal, which was released in 1999.

According to David Sexton, author of The Strange World of Thomas Harris: Inside the Mind of the Creator of Hannibal Lecter, Harris once told a librarian that Lecter was inspired by William Coyne, a local murderer who had escaped from prison in 1934 and gone on a rampage that included acts of murder and cannibalism.