🔗 Share this article

It stands as the most iconic introduction in film history – yet the actor stays utterly motionless.

The FBI trainee, new to the job, proceeds down the line of detention units arriving at Dr. Lecter's reinforced glass enclosure. There he stands, appearing as an animated death's head radiating satanic malice, chillingly static clad in a tight blue inmate uniform. He stands frozen until the moment he lunges toward the window, emitting that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. Numerous documentaries on serial killers have since demonstrated that real-life murderers are usually uninteresting, lacking anything like Hopkins' powerful on-screen charisma.

Hopkins was hardly unrecognized at the time he got his Academy Award-winning part in the 1991 thriller in 1989: it wasn't his debut, but rather a megastar emerged. His portrayal of Lecter was based, the actor happily remembers in this new autobiography, on the classic Dracula, on Stalin as recalled by his daughter, and also from his icily exacting Rada tutor his mentor Fettes. There was also a father-daughter dimension to these scenes; a difficult topic for the actor, who also describes how his King Lear was indirectly affected by an agonised guilt about Abigail, his distant daughter from his failed first union in 1966 with Petronella Barker, who disliked his time away and his alcohol use.

The title originates from an historical picture of Anthony as a small child on the beach with his dad – the child who might have felt he wouldn't succeed. He felt confused, lonely, vulnerable little boy hailing from Port Talbot, his father was Richard Arthur Hopkins, the memorable figure here: a bread-maker and a traditional male, a direct communicator who detested the religious hypocrites at the church and avoided expressing his feelings, but also exhibited dreamy, sentimental tenderness. Richard Hopkins who furiously resented the way they had to go humbly to their rich relatives like Auntie Patty, whose spouse was acquainted with Nye Bevan and helped enroll Anthony as a boy into a prestigious academy: “Due to their immense riches!” he exclaims while traveling there. “We're all hoping for some pickings! Bloody rubbish, that's what it is!”

The pleading was effective, for a time. Anthony struggled academically at the prestigious school. Then, during in an English lesson he was required to perform the verse by John Masefield known as The West Wind – without prior preparation – and that voice came to life; he shocked the educator and the other students. He reasonably claims that poems, alone, launched him. Combined with participating in the YMCA theater group. Remarkably, he left school with low prospects, entered the acting world, and to the astonishment of his parents, was performing with Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic in under a decade. He largely achieved it alone, though at that time financial aid was available to attend Rada – a path to success for working-class actors. His dad remained in awe by his son's international fame: when he asked Anthony to recite the Yorick speech from the play Hamlet, Richard listened carefully and then went into another room and wept openly.

Regarding the fiery, stubborn individual, he left the National Theatre in a moment of anger – to Olivier's profound dismay and displeasure – but lucked into a great TV role playing an alleged war criminal in the show based on Uris's work, which paved the way to parts like that in the film The Elephant Man and a thriving starry career on screen, that he favored compared to stage acting. He gave up alcohol during the mid-70s having been a hell-raising alcoholic, and managed to live into middle age to deliver outstanding roles, including Lecter, the servant Stevens in the film The Remains of the Day alongside Emma Thompson and the elderly man with dementia in the movie The Father – his second Oscar.

During the second part of the memoir his personality becomes more opaque, more deliberate. A few tales doesn't quite come off. He mentions going out for lunch by his co-star in Oliver Stone's Nixon, the esteemed thespian Paul, who wanted to tell him his portrayal of Nixon wasn't working. Was this the chance for Hopkins to learn advice from the renowned performer of the Goodfellas fame? Hardly. Anthony appears to agree with the director's criticism of Sorvino as driven out of envy. Truly?

He repeatedly performs the grounded, serious thespian who believes you must to be on time, learn everyone's name on set and do the job. Quite so. Yet he also tells standing up to an unpleasant filmmaker who brought a background actor to tears: “Apologize to that girl! And acquire some decency. You ever do that again around me, I'll rearrange your face! He appears to be an individual who stopped drinking but possibly not the combativeness that came with it. A classical performer like Hopkins surely knows the lines about Kent from Cornwall from Lear: “He does not know how to flatter! A truthful and simple spirit – he is compelled to be honest!”

Anthony ends his memoir with an extensive addendum composed simply