On stage and on screen, Anthony Hopkins has delivered magnetic performances, not least his Oscar-winning portrayal of the cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.
Now in his late 80s, he has delivered another memorable gem — We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir, an autobiography in which he strips bare his own persona, exposing the inner rages and insecurities, and the drive and talent that have taken him to the very height of his profession and kept him there for decades.
He was not always lauded and admired. In his childhood in his native Wales, his parents and teachers thought he was rather thick, that his head was too large for his body, and that he would never amount to anything.
Just as well then that he stumbled on a profession in which his Welsh lyricism would propel him to global fame and success, as it did with fellow Welshman Richard Burton, whom he had met as a child.
A lucky incident took place: at school, he was asked to recite a poem to his class, and he excelled, moving his classmates to awed silence. By accident once more, he was asked to take part in amateur dramatics, and then went on to win a scholarship to the Cardiff College of Music and Drama.
A spell in repertory theatre followed, after which Hopkins went to the Royal College of Dramatic Art and the National Theatre, which Sir Laurence Olivier ran.
Hopkins had seen the film version of Olivier’s Hamlet, and this performance seems to have so impressed this awkward and insular Welsh schoolboy that he was inevitably drawn into the acting profession.
“I felt that Olivier, as Hamlet, was speaking to me, referring to some long-vanished, ancient part of myself. It was an unearthly experience. The grief of Hamlet over his father’s death and his mother’s betrayal of her dead husband. I cried, overpowered by the epic depiction of damaged fathers and mothers and of how we’re all haunted by the ghosts of memory. I was too young to grasp a modern sense of the words. But a force had broken into the centre of whatever I was,” Hopkins writes.
In the same way as the demon drink came to overshadow the lives of Burton and Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, Hopkins became a heavy drinker and then an alcoholic.
It helped to propel him into arguments and amplified his already combative and volatile character.
“Liquor was beginning to take over my life, and that suited me fine,” he recalls.
“It helped me commit to the loner role I was playing. As a result of my social withdrawal, I missed the joyful frenzy of 1960s London almost entirely. The rip-roaring decade of the swinging sixties, the birth of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Carnaby Street, and the Dolly Birds — it’s all foggy to me.
“This was a time of free love, miniskirts, and political marches, and the United Kingdom rapidly became, against all odds, the hippest place on earth. Fun, fun and more fun. And I experienced no trace of it. Even though it was just down the road, it might as well have been taking place on the moon.”
A wake-up call came when he had to drop out of a production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus on Broadway for a few weeks after developing a thrombosis, and his doctors warned him that he was killing himself with booze and cigarettes.
Eventually, he managed to give up alcohol, and he admits that had he not done so, he might have followed Burton to an early grave.
“There but for the grace of God, I would certainly have gone too by then if I hadn’t gotten sober.”
It was heartening to read that Hopkins uses my own method of learning lines — going through a play repeatedly until you are word perfect. Unlike Hopkins, however, I have no inner demons or innate talent, and my own acting was confined to school and university plays — and the odd press corps Christmas pantomimes.
“I knew all my lines and everyone else’s too. Night after night, I read and reread the script until I knew every syllable. Once you’ve got it down, there’s no stopping you. The words are the gas you put into the tank, whether it’s Shakespeare, Seán O’Casey, or Tennessee Williams,” Hopkins explains.
The highlight of this book, was Hopkins’ account of the way in which he developed the character of Hannibal Lecter.
Initially, there had been doubts about the casting, as he is not American.
“A producer … confessed: ‘We did have our doubts about an English actor playing this American killer,’” Hopkins reveals.
“‘Well, that’s OK, then,’ I said. ‘I’m not English; I’m Welsh.’
“I knew they had nothing to worry about because I instinctively sensed exactly how to play Hannibal. I have the devil in me. We all have the devil in us. I know what scares people. The key is to embody two inner attitudes at the same time that don’t often coexist — he was at once remote and awake.”
And what of that weird and haunting bestial noise that Hannibal Lecter makes when he is first visited in prison by a CIA agent?
Hopkins reveals that it was based on the bloodlust of Dracula: “In the book, the protagonist Jonathan Harker nicks himself with a razor and senses Dracula’s rapt attention. The sound I imagined Dracula made in that moment, thirsting for Harker’s blood, was a very particular combination of hissing and slurping. That’s where I got the sound I made with my lips as Hannibal, the one that gets imitated so much.
“Thank you, Dracula.”
While some actors may preen and pose, desperate to be liked, this autobiography reveals that Hopkins has been scarred by self-doubt, a character full of contradictions, insecurities and a tendency to remain apart from others.
However, his monumental success as an actor, a happy marriage late in life, music, poetry and painting — as well as the teaching and mentoring of younger actors — seem to have given him more peace and contentment later in life than he ever enjoyed as a child.
No one can doubt his courage in penning this book, which provides an absorbing and penetrating insight into the life of a remarkable individual, all the while peppered with his own modesty and surprise that the Welsh schoolkid rose to become such a highly regarded and honoured theatrical knight and movie superstar.
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