🔗 Share this article

Many consider it the most iconic entrance in film history – while he stands without moving a muscle.

Clarice Starling, new to the job, must walk the line of detention units until she reaches Dr. Lecter's transparent prison. He is positioned, with features like a skeletal visage radiating satanic malice, eerily immobile in his form-fitting blue inmate uniform. He remains motionless until the moment he lunges toward the window, making that unforgettable spitting-growling noise. Countless documentaries on serial killers have since revealed that actual serial killers are usually uninteresting, lacking anything like Hopkins' powerful on-screen charisma.

Hopkins was hardly a newcomer at the time he got that Oscar-winning role in the iconic film during the late 80s: he was already established, instead, a superstar was cemented. The character of Hannibal was based, Hopkins cheerfully recalls in this new autobiography, from Lugosi's Dracula, on Joseph Stalin based on his daughter's accounts, and also from his rigorously precise acting coach Christopher Fettes. Additionally, there existed a parent-child dynamic to these scenes; a painful subject for Anthony, who also describes how his Lear was indirectly affected by deep-seated remorse regarding his daughter Abigail, the daughter he was separated from from his disastrous first marriage in 1966 to his first wife, who resented his time away and his alcohol use.

The title originates from a vintage war-era photograph of Hopkins as a toddler with his father at the seaside – the child who might have felt he couldn't make it. He felt confused, isolated and sensitive child hailing from Port Talbot, the child of Richard Hopkins, the memorable figure in this story: a bread-maker and man's man, a straightforward talker who detested the Bible-punching hypocrites of the chapel and didn't believe in showing his emotions, yet possessed a touch of dreamy, sentimental tenderness. Richard Hopkins who furiously resented how they were forced cap-in-hand to their wealthy relations like Auntie Patty, whose husband knew the famous Bevan and could get Anthony as a boy into an elite school: “Since they are extremely wealthy!” he raves during the car ride. “We are all expecting handouts! Bloody rubbish, that's what it is!”

The humility worked, for a time. Hopkins was a hopeless student at the prestigious school. But one day in a literature class he needed to deliver the verse by John Masefield The West Wind – without seeing it first – and his voice awakened; he shocked the educator and his classmates. He convincingly states that poetry, on its own, launched him. This, along with enrolling in the YMCA theater group. Surprisingly, he exited school a no-hoper, entered the acting world, and shocking his family, was performing alongside Laurence Olivier at the renowned Old Vic within 10 years. He more or less did it on his own, though at that time scholarships existed to attend Rada – an opportunity for performers from modest means. His dad remained in awe of Anthony's global success: on asking his son to perform the Yorick monologue from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hopkins Sr listened attentively and then left the room and wept openly.

As for the hot-tempered, stubborn individual, he quit the National Theatre company out of frustration – much to Olivier's disappointment and criticism – but stumbled upon a great TV role playing an alleged war criminal in the series QB VII, which led indirectly to parts like that in David Lynch's The Elephant Man and a luminous film journey in movies, that he favored over theater. He gave up alcohol during the mid-70s once a notorious drinker, and managed to live into middle age to deliver outstanding roles, such as Lecter, the servant Stevens in The Remains of the Day alongside Emma Thompson and the elderly man with dementia in the movie The Father – his second Academy Award.

In the latter half of the book his personality becomes more opaque, more deliberate. Some of the anecdotage fall a bit flat. He mentions going out for lunch by his co-star in Stone's Nixon, the esteemed thespian Sorvino, who wanted to tell him his portrayal of Nixon was falling short. Was this the opportunity for Anthony to gain insight a lesson from the famous actor of the Goodfellas fame? Not exactly. He tends to concur with Stone's rejection of Sorvino as being motivated out of envy. Really?

He often portrays the no-nonsense, practical performer who maintains it's your duty to be on time, remember every crew member's name and proceed with the work. Indeed. Yet he also tells confronting an obnoxious director who caused a young extra to weep: “Apologise to her! And learn some manners. You ever do that again in front of me, I'll change the shape of your face! Anthony comes across as someone who gave up drink yet perhaps not the aggression that accompanied it. A Shakespearean like him is aware of the lines about Kent from Cornwall from Lear: “He does not know how to flatter! A straightforward and sincere nature – he always tells the truth!”

Anthony ends his memoir with a lengthy appendix composed simply