🔗 Share this article

It stands as the most memorable entrance in movie lore – and he remains completely still.

Clarice Starling, new to the job, navigates the line of detention units arriving at the notorious doctor's reinforced glass enclosure. The man is present, his face resembling a skeletal visage exuding demonic evil, eerily immobile wearing a snug prisoner's blue outfit. He stands frozen right up until he throws himself at the barrier, making that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. Countless documentaries on serial killers have since demonstrated that real-life murderers are often very boring, lacking anything like Hopkins' captivating film persona.

He was not a newcomer when he landed his Academy Award-winning part in The Silence of the Lambs back in 1989: he was already established, but a legend was cemented. The character of Hannibal was based, Hopkins cheerfully recalls in this new autobiography, from Lugosi's Dracula, on the Soviet leader as recalled by his daughter, as well as his rigorously precise acting coach his instructor Fettes. The scenes also contained a parent-child dynamic to these scenes; a painful subject for Hopkins, who also describes how his Lear was indirectly affected by an agonised guilt regarding his daughter Abigail, the estranged daughter from his disastrous first marriage in 1966 to Petronella Barker, who disliked him being away and drinking.

The title originates from a vintage war-era photograph of Anthony as a small child on the beach with his dad – the boy who perhaps believed he wouldn't succeed. He felt confused, isolated and sensitive child from Port Talbot, his father was Richard Arthur Hopkins, the scene-stealing supporting player in the narrative: a baker and man's man, a straightforward talker who despised the religious 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 was angered by how they were forced humbly to their wealthy relations such as Aunt Patty, whose husband knew Nye Bevan and was able to secure the young Anthony into a posh school: “Because they're bloody rich!” he shouts while traveling there. “Everyone is looking for scraps! Absolute nonsense, that's the truth!”

The pleading was effective, for a time. Anthony struggled academically in his new institution. Then, during in an English lesson he needed to deliver the poem by Masefield The West Wind – without seeing it first – and his voice awakened; he amazed the instructor and the other boys. He convincingly states that poetry, on its own, propelled him forward. This, along with enrolling in the dramatic society at the YMCA. Remarkably, he left school without much hope, went into acting, and shocking his family, was acting with the great Olivier at the Old Vic in just ten years. He largely achieved it alone, although in those days there were grants to go to Rada – a path to success for performers from modest means. His father was always amazed with Anthony's worldwide acclaim: upon requesting his son to recite the Yorick speech from the play Hamlet, Hopkins Sr listened attentively and then left the room and burst into tears.

As for the hot-tempered, bloody-minded son, he departed the theatrical troupe in a fit of pique – to Olivier's profound dismay and displeasure – but stumbled upon a great TV role playing an alleged war criminal in Leon Uris's QB VII, which paved the way to parts like that in Lynch's The Elephant Man and a luminous film journey in movies, which he preferred compared to stage acting. And he quit booze back in 1975 having been a hell-raising alcoholic, and so survived through midlife to execute great performances, such as Lecter, the butler Stevens in the movie with Emma Thompson alongside Emma Thompson and the elderly man with dementia in his film The Father – his second Oscar.

During the second part of the book he appears more reserved, more studied. Some of the anecdotage doesn't quite come off. He recalls having lunch alongside his cast mate in the film Nixon, the esteemed thespian Paul, who intended to inform him his performance as Nixon wasn't working. Was this the chance for Anthony to gain insight a lesson from the famous actor of the Goodfellas fame? Hardly. He tends to concur with the director's criticism of Sorvino as driven due to resentment. Truly?

He consistently acts as the tough, down-to-earth professional actor who believes it is one's responsibility to be on time, know all the crew's names and get on with it. Indeed. Yet he also tells facing a rude director who'd made a young extra cry: “Apologize to that girl! And acquire some decency. You ever do that again in front of me, I'll change the shape of your face! Anthony comes across as an individual who stopped drinking but maybe not the belligerence that accompanied it. A Shakespearean like him surely knows the lines about Kent from Cornwall from the play Lear: “He does not know how to flatter! A truthful and simple spirit – he always tells the truth!”

Anthony ends his memoir with an extensive addendum composed simply