🔗 Share this article

It stands as the greatest introduction in movie lore – while he stands utterly motionless.

A young FBI agent, just starting out, navigates the line of detention units finally encountering Hannibal Lecter's reinforced glass enclosure. He is positioned, with features like an animated death's head radiating satanic malice, chillingly static clad in a tight blue prison jumpsuit. He doesn't move right up until he propels himself toward the window, producing that unforgettable spitting-growling noise. Numerous true-crime documentaries have since shown that real-life murderers are usually uninteresting, far from the actor's powerful on-screen charisma.

He was not unrecognized at the time he got that Oscar-winning role in the 1991 thriller during the late 80s: a star wasn't born, but a legend was forged. His Dr. Lecter was inspired, the actor happily remembers in his recent memoir, on the classic Dracula, on Joseph Stalin as recalled by his daughter, and on his own icily exacting Rada tutor his mentor Fettes. The scenes also contained a father-daughter dimension within the narrative; a painful subject for the actor, who further explains how his King Lear was subconsciously influenced by an agonised guilt concerning Abigail, the estranged daughter from his disastrous first marriage in 1966 to his first wife, who resented his absences and his drinking habits.

The memoir's title is derived from an old wartime photo of Anthony as a small child playing on the sand with his father – the boy who perhaps believed he couldn't make it. He was a bewildered, shy and fragile youth from Port Talbot, the child of Richard Hopkins, the memorable figure in the narrative: a baker and man's man, a plain speaker who detested the sanctimonious churchgoers at the church and avoided expressing his feelings, yet possessed a touch of dreamy, sentimental tenderness. It was Hopkins Sr who deeply disliked how they were forced humbly to their rich relatives including Auntie Patty, who was connected to the politician Nye Bevan and was able to secure young Anthony into an elite school: “Due to their immense riches!” he raves while traveling there. “Everyone is looking for scraps! Absolute nonsense, that's the truth!”

The pleading was effective, temporarily. He was a poor student at his new school. But one day in a literature class he was required to perform the poem by Masefield known as The West Wind – sight unseen – and his voice awakened; he shocked the educator and his classmates. He convincingly states that poems, alone, launched him. This, and joining the dramatic society at the YMCA. Notably, he graduated with low prospects, went into acting, and shocking his family, was performing with the great Olivier at the Old Vic within 10 years. He more or less did it on his own, although in those days financial aid was available to go to Rada – a way up for actors from humble backgrounds. Richard Hopkins was continually impressed of Anthony's global success: upon requesting his son to perform the Yorick monologue from the play Hamlet, Richard listened carefully and then went into another room and began crying.

Regarding the fiery, stubborn individual, he departed the theatrical troupe in a moment of anger – much to Olivier's disappointment and displeasure – but fortunately found a memorable TV character as a potential war criminal in Leon Uris's QB VII, which eventually resulted to parts like that in the film The Elephant Man and a successful acting career in cinema, that he favored over theater. He stopped drinking in 1975 once a notorious drinker, and so survived through midlife to execute great performances, such as Lecter, the steward Stevens in the film 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 later sections of the memoir his character seems more elusive, more calculated. Certain stories aren't entirely successful. He remembers going out for lunch by his co-star in Oliver Stone's Nixon, the esteemed thespian Sorvino, who sought to advise him his performance as Nixon wasn't working. Was this the chance for Hopkins to learn something from the legendary star of the Goodfellas fame? Hardly. Hopkins seems to go along with Stone's rejection of Sorvino as driven out of envy. Truly?

He often portrays the grounded, serious thespian who maintains you must to get there on time, learn everyone's name on set and proceed with the work. Quite so. Yet he also tells standing up to an unpleasant filmmaker who brought a background actor to tears: “Say sorry to her! And acquire some decency. Should you ever act that way around me, I'll rearrange your face! Hopkins sounds like an individual who stopped drinking yet perhaps not the aggression that accompanied it. A classical performer like Hopkins surely knows the lines about Kent from Cornwall from the play Lear: “He does not know how to flatter! A straightforward and sincere nature – he always tells the truth!”

He finishes his autobiography with a lengthy appendix composed simply