We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir by Anthony Hopkins review – a legend with a temper

It’s the greatest entrance in movie history – and he doesn’t move a muscle. FBI rookie Clarice Starling must walk along the row of cells until she reaches Dr Lecter’s reinforced glass tank, where the man himself is simply standing, his face a living skull of satanic malice, eerily immobile in his form-fitting blue prison jumpsuit – immobile, that is, until such time as he launches himself against the glass, making that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. A billion true-crime documentaries have since revealed that actual serial killers are very boring, with nothing like Anthony Hopkins’s screen presence. He was hardly an unknown when he got that Oscar-winning part in The Silence of the Lambs in 1989: a star wasn’t born, but rather a megastar, a legend. His Dr Lecter was based, Hopkins cheerfully recalls in this new autobiography, on Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, on Stalin as recalled by his daughter, and on his own icily exacting, gimlet-eyed Rada tutor Christopher Fettes. There was a father-daughter dimension to these scenes as well; a painful subject for Hopkins, who also describes how his Lear was subconsciously influenced by an agonised guilt about Abigail, the estranged daughter from his disastrous first marriage in 1966 to Petronella Barker, who resented his absences and drinking. The title comes from an old wartime photo of Hopkins as a toddler on the beach with his dad – the kid who maybe thought he would never do OK. He was a bewildered, lonely, vulnerable little boy from Port Talbot, son of Richard Arthur Hopkins, the scene-stealing supporting player here: a baker and man’s man, a plain speaker who loathed the Bible-punching hypocrites of the chapel and didn’t believe in showing his emotions, but had a streak of wistful, tearful romanticism. It was Hopkins Sr who furiously resented the way they had to go cap-in-hand to their wealthy relations like Auntie Patty, whose husband knew Nye Bevan and could get young Anthony into a posh school: “Because they’re bloody rich!” he raves in the car on the way there. “We’re all hoping for some pickings! Bloody rubbish, that’s what it is!” The grovelling paid off, for a while. Hopkins was a hopeless student at his new school. But one day in an English lesson he had to recite John Masefield’s poem The West Wind – sight unseen – and that voice came to life; he stunned the teacher and the other boys. He says quite plausibly that poetry, on its own, launched him. This, and joining the YMCA drama club. Remarkably, he left school a no-hoper, went into acting, and to the astonishment of his parents was on stage with Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic within 10 years. He more or less did it on his own, although in those days there were grants to go to Rada – a way up for working-class actors. His dad remained in awe of Anthony’s global success: on asking his son to recite the Yorick speech from Hamlet, Hopkins Sr listened attentively and then went into another room and burst into tears. As for the hot-tempered, bloody-minded son, he quit the National Theatre company in a fit of pique – to Olivier’s profound dismay and disapproval – but lucked into a great TV role as a suspected war criminal in Leon Uris’s QB VII, which led indirectly to parts like that in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and a thriving starry career on screen, which he preferred to the stage. And he quit booze in 1975 having been a hell-raising alcoholic, and so survived into middle age to execute great performances, including Lecter, the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day with Emma Thompson and the old man with dementia in The Father – his second Oscar. In the latter half of the book his personality becomes more opaque, more studied. Some of the anecdotage doesn’t quite come off. He recalls being taken out to lunch by his co-star in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, the much-respected actor Paul Sorvino, who wanted to tell him his performance as Nixon wasn’t working. Was this the moment for Hopkins to learn something from the legendary star of Scorsese’s Goodfellas? Not exactly. Hopkins seems to go along with Stone’s dismissal of Sorvino as being motivated by jealousy. Really? He repeatedly performs the tough, down-to-earth professional actor who believes it’s your duty to get there on time, know all the crew’s names and get on with it. Quite so. But he also recounts confronting an obnoxious director who’d made a young extra cry: “Apologise to her! And learn some manners. You ever do that again in front of me, I’ll change the shape of your face!” Hopkins sounds like someone who gave up drink but maybe not the belligerence that went with it. A Shakespearean like him must know Cornwall’s lines on Kent from Lear: “He cannot flatter, he! An honest mind and plain – he must speak truth!” Hopkins concludes his book with a lengthy appendix composed simply of his favourite poems: an outrageous indulgence, perhaps, and yet it is the transcendental power of these works, and the discipline of learning them by heart, to which he owes his success. • We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir by Anthony Hopkins is published by Simon & Schuster (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.