🔗 Share this article

It stands as the most iconic introduction in movie lore – yet the actor stays utterly motionless.

Clarice Starling, new to the job, proceeds down the line of detention units arriving at the notorious doctor's reinforced glass enclosure. There he stands, appearing as a living skull exuding demonic evil, chillingly static clad in a tight blue prison jumpsuit. He doesn't move until the moment he lunges at the barrier, emitting that distinctive snarling-hissing noise. Countless real-crime films have since demonstrated that genuine criminals are often very boring, lacking anything like the actor's commanding screen presence.

He wasn't exactly an unknown at the time he got his Academy Award-winning part in the 1991 thriller during the late 80s: a star wasn't born, but a legend was forged. The character of Hannibal was inspired, Hopkins cheerfully recalls in this new autobiography, on Bela Lugosi's Dracula, on Joseph Stalin based on his daughter's accounts, and on his own rigorously precise Rada tutor his mentor Fettes. The scenes also contained a father-daughter dimension to these scenes; a sore point for the actor, who recounts how his portrayal of Lear was unknowingly shaped by painful regret concerning Abigail, the estranged daughter from his failed first union back in 1966 to Petronella Barker, who disliked him being away and his drinking habits.

The memoir's title is derived from an old wartime photo of a young Hopkins with his father at the seaside – the child who might have felt he couldn't make it. He was a bewildered, lonely, vulnerable little boy raised in Port Talbot, son of Richard Arthur Hopkins, the standout secondary character in the narrative: a pastry chef and a traditional male, a direct communicator who despised the religious hypocrites in their community and refused to expressing his feelings, but also exhibited dreamy, sentimental tenderness. Richard Hopkins who deeply disliked the necessity of going humbly to affluent family members like Auntie Patty, whose spouse was acquainted with Nye Bevan and helped enroll Anthony as a boy into an elite school: “Due to their immense riches!” he raves while traveling there. “We're all hoping for some pickings! Absolute nonsense, that's the truth!”

The pleading was effective, for a time. Hopkins was a hopeless student at the prestigious school. However, one day in an English lesson he needed to deliver John Masefield's poem known as The West Wind – sight unseen – and his talent emerged; he stunned the teacher and the other students. He reasonably claims that poems, alone, started his career. Combined with participating in the YMCA theater group. Remarkably, he left school with low prospects, went into acting, and to the astonishment of his parents, was on stage with Laurence Olivier at the renowned Old Vic in just ten years. He accomplished it mostly independently, although in those days scholarships existed to go to Rada – an opportunity for actors from humble backgrounds. His dad remained in awe by his son's international fame: upon requesting his son to perform the Yorick monologue from Hamlet, Hopkins Sr listened attentively and then left the room and began crying.

Concerning the volatile, bloody-minded son, he quit the National Theatre company out of frustration – to Olivier's profound dismay and displeasure – but stumbled upon a great TV role playing an alleged war criminal in the series QB VII, which eventually resulted to characters including in Lynch's The Elephant Man and a thriving starry career on screen, which he preferred to the stage. He stopped drinking back in 1975 once a notorious drinker, and so survived into his later years to execute great performances, such as Lecter, the servant Stevens in the movie with Emma Thompson featuring Emma Thompson and the elderly man with dementia in the movie The Father – his next Oscar win.

In the later sections of the memoir his character seems more elusive, more deliberate. A few tales fall a bit flat. He mentions going out for lunch by his co-star in Stone's Nixon, the esteemed thespian Paul, who sought to advise him his portrayal of Nixon wasn't working. Was this the chance for him to absorb a lesson from the famous actor of Scorsese's Goodfellas? Not exactly. He tends to concur with Stone's dismissal of Sorvino as driven due to resentment. Truly?

He consistently acts as the grounded, serious thespian who thinks it is one's responsibility to arrive punctually, know all the crew's names and do the job. Indeed. But he also recounts standing up to an unpleasant filmmaker who'd made a young extra cry: “Say sorry to her! And acquire some decency. You ever do that again in front of me, I'll change the shape of your face! He appears to be a person who quit alcohol but possibly not the combativeness that went with it. An actor of his caliber is aware of Cornwall's lines on Kent in King Lear: “He cannot flatter, he! An honest mind and plain – he always tells the truth!”

Hopkins concludes his book with a detailed supplement composed simply