by Anthony Hopkins, 2025
Excellent book by Sir Anthony Hopkins, telling his life story. He never mentions when he was born, just that he is 87 years old, and the book was published in 2025, so I’m guessing he was born in 1938, just like Mom. He was born and grew up in Wales, the only child of a baker and his wife, in the town of Port Talbot, South Wales. Richard Burton was a neighbor of his and used to come back to visit. Anthony got his autograph one day. He watched him drive away in his Jaguar and vowed to be like him one day.
This was an excellent book. I love the way he writes and tells stories – you are carried away page after page. Unbelievably, he is a very morose and lonely boy. The only child of his father and mother, Arthur Richard Hopkins and Muriel Hopkins. His dad is a baker. They all grew up in hard times, wars and hardships and endless work from an early age. His dad was particularly hard on him – berating him – telling him he’ll never amount to anything – basically, what’s wrong with you, you loser.
There were a few, very few bright moments in his childhood – when he was three and got a second cough lozenge after his fell in the sand – there’s a picture of him and his dad on the sand. His dad looks nice and has a nice smile. And when he saw the film Hamlet at boarding school and it changed his life. And when he was asked to recite a poem in front of class at age 15 – this is talked about at the end of the book, in the appendix of poems he added. The poem was “The West Wind” by John Masefield. He was a nobody and his teacher asked him to come up to the front of the class and read a poem. That was the poem the book was open to. He read it and after he was done, complete silence of the entire class. The teacher told him that was good, very good. He gave him the poetry book to keep.
He had a talent for acting and he got a scholarship to a drama school: RADA (Royal Academy for Dramatic Art). After he graduated, he got some jobs as Assistant Stage Manager with some parts thrown in. Those were hard and didn’t amount to anything. Eventually, he becomes Laurence Olivier’s understudy and he works for years doing plays.
This whole time, he still has the negative voice in his head that tells him he is doomed and there is no future for him. He drinks – a lot. He sometimes loses his cool and storms out of jobs, but he either gets asked to come back or something better comes along. The first movie he did was A Lion in Winter in 1968. From there, he discovers he prefers movie acting to stage acting, because he can be done with it and doesn’t have to repeat the same lines day after day after day.
He realizes he is an alcoholic, but every actor is in that day and age. Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, all of them get drunk every single day. He did one movie in 1975 (I think) where he remembers none of it and neither do any of the actors – they were drunk every day.
In 1975, he crashes his car against a Eucalyptus tree in California. He asks his agent the next day, where is my car. He tells him you’re lucky we found you – otherwise you’d be in jail. He is horrified that he has absolutely no recollection of driving – he could have killed someone. At that moment, he hears a voice asking him if he wants to live or to die. He says he wants to live. The voice tells him, okay, from today on, you begin living. From that point on he lost the urge to drink and has been sober for over 50 years now.
When he was a little boy, an elementary teacher had them memorize The Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm. It seems he really treasured those. He was reciting them to his parents and his father told him to stop – it was hogwash, or something like that. His father was an atheist.
He loves to paint. He loves to play the piano. He used to play Moonlight Sonata over and over again and drive his Dad crazy. He is with his 3rd wife, Stella, now and he adores her and is very happy. At the end of his Tributes section, he recounts that when the book was going to publish in January 2025, they lost their home in the Palisades Fire. “It wasn’t a grand house, but there were a few things we valued. Now they have vanished. So? Everything vanishes in the end. Onward…”
He had the ability to memorize things. He was given a 10-volume Encyclopedia set by his Dad and he read it over and over and over again. He had it memorized. He would do the same thing with scripts. He would read the play over and over again until he had the entire play memorized.
Here are some of the quotes I liked:
A Robert Duvall quote from Tender Mercies: “See, I don’t trust happiness. I never did, and I never will.”
In 1963, he went to see Days of Wine and Roses expecting it to be another Jack Lemmon comedy. It was all about alcoholism and it struck him – he remembers the Lee Remick character, Kirsten, saying “the world looks dirty without a drink.” She refused to give it up. He writes: “Sometimes I would stop for a week or two. Three weeks was my limit. Any longer, I felt I was going mad…It took another twelve years for me to cut the knot and enter a new world. Twelve more years of one bottle after another falling out of my hand into the water.”
He went to coffee with a reformed alcoholic named Mary and she told him alcoholism was a “three-fold illness, Mental, physical, and emotional.” “She went on to explain the nature of compulsions and obsessions. I knew all about those. They were more than familiar to me–anxious fixations on details, times, and dates in any year, clear and anxious memories of conversations and situations. They were irritating but I didn’t think they were harmful. On the contrary, they were productive! I could memorize poems and recite them at rapid speed.”
“It was at RADA that I realized my ability to note details–a mechanical process, a photographic memory–was not common to all actors; it was special. Where did a certain person live? What day of the week was April 1, 1955? I could tell you all of it. How many steps were there in my apartment building? It was a technical mechanism,something like having my very own calculating machine. I was grateful for any opportunity to quiet down my brain, and I think that was what made me so enthusiastic about drinking. Not that I needed a reason. Everyone drank. It was the national pastime!”
“I told Mary all this. She talked to me about our incurable and insatiable need for peace and freedom from unidentified fear and anxiety….
“I told her that I didn’t think I was an alcoholic, that I could stop drinking anytime I wanted to. Mary never pushed it further.”
Pgs 192-193, when he tells the story of December 29, 1975:
“It would be some time, though, before I hit bottom. That came once we’d relocated out West. Booze is fine if you can keep it in check; I believe it can help you through certain awkward situations, be part of a joyful life. But there’s a cost. The fun of drinking is a scorpion–its tail is lethal.
“C.S. Lewis said, from deep within himself, “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with him. He walks everywhere incognito.”
“Well, He was with me one Saturday night when I drove my car in a drunken blackout through Beverly Hills. I’d driven that car all night from Arizona without knowing what I was doing. I could have killed someone. I could have taken out a whole family. I found out what I’d done when I went to my agent and said, “Someone’s stolen my car!” and my agent said, “Nobody stole it. We found you on the road. You would be in jail right now if we hadn’t.”
“As I sobered up, I looked up at the eucalyptus trees and thanked God no one had died that night. I imagined my parents back in Wales hearing that I’d killed someone or myself. I saw their hopes smashed. I heard a voice ask me, Do you want to live or do you want to die?
“I want to live, a voice answered from somewhere deep inside me.
“Then I heard the voice say, It’s all over now. You can start living.
“The craving to drink left me. That was eleven o’clock on December 29, 1975. What grace the universe showed me in that moment. How lucky I am to have found clarity at last, to say that I would do everything in my power and call on all other sources of power to never again have a night I didn’t remember, to never again get behind the wheel and endanger others, to never again let that monster creep across the room and up my leg, making me cruel and cold.
“”I’m an alcoholic and I need help,” I told my agent. He got me the time off I needed to focus on getting treatment.
“The tradition I belong to suggests that it’s much better to change lives one person at a time by helping them one on one rather than by crowing to the world about having found a cure for one’s affliction. This is known in the rooms as attraction rather than promotion. And so I will say only that if you’re starting to wake up to the ways in which alcohol is ruining your life, as I did to the ways it was ruining mine, there are people out there who will take you out for coffee. You can find them in every city and town at every hour of the day. I still go to meetings now myself, almost fifty years after getting sober.
“The day after my revelation, I went out for lunch with my friend Bob Palmer, who brought a long his friend George. They were going to take me to my first Twelve Step meeting.
“I was in a state of shock because the urge to drink had gone…”
Pg. 195: “On one of the early days of my recovery, I was driving through Los Angeles when I felt called to pull over to a Catholic church. There I found a young Black priest going into his office.
“”Can I talk to you a minute?” I asked.
“He said, “Yeah, come in. How can I help you?”
“I said, “I found God.”
“”Congratulations,” he said. “It’s called grace. You had to choose between life and death, and you chose life. God was there all the time asking you that question. He was just waiting for you to make up your mind.”
Pg. 197: “My first sober job was in Europe, playing Lieutenant Colonel John Frost in the World War II film A Bridge Too Far.”
Pg 204, his only daughter Abigail, he had to leave her and his first wife when she was one year old. He was a drunk and he and his wife fought constantly. He was going to kill her, or she was going to kill him. He adored his baby girl and it broke him to have to leave her, though. The tabloids wrote about her and him and told lies later on and that really hurt him. He did say after 20 years of not hearing from her, he had no idea where she was and frankly didn’t care. But it hurt him – and he knows he hurt her by leaving her but he had no other choice.
“That hardness is my default. [no emotions, move on, like his grandfather] As Charles Bukowski wrote, “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing.”
“I hope my daughter knows that my door is always open to her. I want her to be well and happy. Until the day I die, I will never forget the sight of her in that crib, laughing up at me when I walked in the room the first year of her life, sleeping soundly the night I left. I will always be sorry for hurting her when I left the family, even as I believe to this day that I had no choice.”
Page 222-224: He is in Rome shooting a movie, Mussolini and I, after Richard Burton’s death at age 58 of a brain hemorrhage, “though alcohol abuse had certainly been a factor. There but for the grace of God I would certainly have gone too by then if I hadn’t gotten sober.”
“At the time, I’d been complaining about the script and about everything, really, when suddenly I realized that I was in Rome, and I was working, and I was at a beautiful hotel, the Hotel de la Ville, above the Spanish Steps, sitting in a lush garden in the sunshine. How can I be dissatisfied? What is wrong with me?
“It was in that state of searching that a sort of mantra came to me. I fell asleep and when I woke up, a string of lines popped into my head that I repeated to myself every day for many years to come.
“It’s none of my business what people say of me or think of me. I am what I am and I do what I do for fun and free. Because I love it. It’s all in the game, the wonderful game, the play of life upon life itself. There’s nothing to prove. There’s nothing to win; there’s nothing to lose. No sweat, no big deal. there are no big deals. Of myself, I am nothing, and of myself I can do nothing. It is the presence within that transforms and does everything. Of myself I am nothing. And so I go about this business doing the best I can with what I’ve got.”
“I said it to myself over and over again, and I found that my new attitude opened me up to new roles and new experiences that enriched my life.”
The whole chapter (Chapter 19, Fava Beans and a Nice Chianti), about Silence of the Lambs freaked me out. He got into that role and made Hannibal Lecter the freaky, scary, devil, monster, with the little ways he decided to play him. He was so scary, he scared Jodie Foster. “…I instinctively sensed exactly how to play Hannibal. I have the devil in me. We all have the devil in us. I know what scares people. The key is to embody two inner attitudes at the same time that don’t often coexist–he was at once remote and awake.” He decides to voice him like HAL, the computer on 2001: A Space Odyssey. “…with flat, controlled certainty…” He decided to have him standing up silently waiting for Clarice Starling (Jodie’s character). Silently waiting and watching. So hauntingly scary. I’ve never seen that movie and do not intend to see it. It was the first horror movie to win the Oscar. Both Jodie and Anthony won Best Actor Oscars for it.
Movies to watch: He and Emma Thompson in Howard’s End and Remains of the Day, Shadowlands, again (Wayne doesn’t think he’s seen it).
This is hilarious, on page 259 when he’s naming directors and actors and actresses he admires: “Guy Ritchie has that meticulous eye, as do Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, and Michael Bay. Spielberg came to my U.S. citizenship ceremony in April 2000, when I was sixty-two. He videotaped me taking the oath, and a woman sitting nearby commented on what a nice camera he had.
“”I do bar mitzvahs as well,” he told her.
“When I get going naming actors I admire, it’s hard for me to stop. Taron Egerton was phenomenal as Elton John in Rocket Man. Ed Norton. Billy Burke. Olivia Colman…
“And Jonathan Pryce, whom I appeared with in The Two Popes. Jonathan and I are both Welsh; he’s from the north and I’m from the south. One can have a lot of fun trying to prove that the South Welsh are the true Welsh and the North Welsh are…
“Well, Jonathan has yet to put his case forward.
“Mark Gatiss. Salma Hayek. Michael Gambon. Mark Wahlberg. Emma Thompson. Josh Brolin. Sean Penn. Winona Ryder. Robert Downey Jr. Judith Dench is probably the best actress there is. Sylvester Stallone I don’t know too well, but I occasionally meet him in passing. I so admired his powerful determination to stay strong and tough, refusing to let anyone else be cast as the lead in his screenplay Rocky.
“Michael Caine is another lifer who stayed the course. Like me, he found that movies let him enjoy his life more than theater did; for him, that means collecting art (he said once that he couldn’t afford to do theater anymore because he’d developed a burning desire to own a van Gogh). I admire those who still do theater, too, of course, like the great Ian McKellen, whom I was thrilled to appear with in The Dresser, a film directed by the wonderful Richard Eyre. We are roughly the same age, and he’s unstoppable. I don’t know if we will work together again. I certainly hope we do. That one film we made together was a highlight of my life.
“From Nixon, I went on to do another unlikely part in Surviving Picasso. While I wasn’t a particularly natural choice to play a macho Spanish womanizer, I was fascinated by the artist, and I loved hearing stories about him. In one, Richard Burton invited Picasso to lunch, and Picasso turned up with a retinue of people. Burton didn’t speak Spanish or French, and he was concerned about paying for lunch for such a big group. He needn’t have worried. When the check came, Picasso did a drawing on a napkin and handed it to the waiter, more than covering the bill with a stroke of his pencil. That was the panache he had.”
The Edge is a movie he did with Alec Baldwin. He came up with the title for it. His back was killing him and he finally had to have surgery while they were filming in Canada.
Also watch Zorro, with him and directed by Steven Spielberg.
Also watch World’s Fastest Indian: “…about Burt Munro’s attempt to break the land-speed record on his motorbike, Stella said to Bruce Willis, “Can you keep an eye on my husband? Because he’s nuts.” She was afraid I’d try to do my own stunts, which I absolutely did.”
Also watch Thor – he plays the part of Odin, Thor’s father.
“Kenneth Branagh is extremely precise as a director. I’d seen him several times onstage and in films, and I’d met him years earlier when I’d worked with his then wife, Emma Thompson. He’d often been compared to Olivier and even played him in the film My Week with Marilyn. And I found his direction to be like Olivier’s: professional, flexible, clever.
“In some ways, those movies with big special effects feel a little bit NAR, to use Gregory Peck’s term. I heard it from a man who in 1951 worked at a studio in London made up to look like a ship for the war film Captain Horatio Hornblower. He came across Gregory Peck’s script and noticed that NAR was written on certain pages. He gave it back to Peck, who thanked him.
“”Mr. Peck, can I ask you what NAR means?”
“Peck replied, “No acting required.”
He believes the greatest part ever written for an actor is King Lear.
Pages 293-294, he’s talking with a group of young actors:
“…I know a couple of you work here at restaurants and hotels. Great–do the best you can with what you’ve got. Whatever grotty situation you live in, make the best of it. If it’s too rough, find another job. Be open and it will happen. Just avoid the crust of bitterness and resentment. Don’t let that become a shield. Because that’s the end of your ability to be a good human being or a good actor.”
He likes the famous Theodore Roosevelt “Man in the Arena” speech from 1910. His dad liked it to. He recounts it to the young actors:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
A later movie, The Father, is about a man suffering from dementia. Might want to see that one.
In the Tributes section, he was having breakfast, trying to, with Bob Palmer who become a dear friend. His hands were shaking – he had a tequila hangover. He was shocked that his hands were shaking – he had seen that in The Days of Wine and Roses. Bob Palmer was his first real friend. He asked him how he felt:
“”Inadequate,” I replied. That was the only word I knew. It had been stuck like a a glass splinter in my head for as long as I could remember.
“”Good. Because you are exactly that. You are inadequate.”
“That was a welcome slap in the face.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“”Can you predict what will happen in the next two seconds or minutes or half hour? Can you predict anything?”
“”No.”
“”Right. That’s why you have no power.”
“Bob took a sip of his coffee.
“”We think we have power, especially drunks like us. We are a bunch of noisy know-it-alls, but we know nothing. We are just busted, disgusted, and not to be trusted. So what? Accept it. We are nothing. Give up the fight. There is nothing to fight, nothing to win and nothing to lose. No sweat, no big deal. Join the human race.”
“Suddenly, it all made sense. Peace.”