We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir by Anthony Hopkins – Insights: An Icon with a Temper

Widely regarded as the greatest entrance in movie lore – yet the actor stays utterly motionless.

A young FBI agent, a rookie, proceeds down a corridor of cells finally encountering the notorious doctor's transparent prison. There he stands, with features like a living skull radiating satanic malice, unnervingly still clad in a tight blue prison jumpsuit. He stands frozen until the moment he throws himself against the glass, producing that distinctive snarling-hissing noise. A multitude of documentaries on serial killers have since demonstrated that actual serial killers are often very boring, lacking anything like the actor's captivating film persona.

He wasn't exactly unrecognized at the time he got the part that won him an Oscar in the 1991 thriller during the late 80s: it wasn't his debut, but rather a megastar emerged. His Dr. Lecter was inspired, the actor happily remembers in this new autobiography, on the classic Dracula, on Stalin based on his daughter's accounts, and on his own icily exacting drama teacher his instructor Fettes. There was also a parent-child dynamic to these scenes; a painful subject for Anthony, who recounts how his King Lear was indirectly affected by an agonised guilt concerning Abigail, his distant daughter from his disastrous first marriage during the 60s to his first wife, who was angered by his absences 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 wouldn't succeed. He felt confused, lonely, vulnerable little boy raised in Port Talbot, the child of Richard Hopkins, the standout secondary character in this story: a bread-maker and a tough individual, a straightforward talker who detested the religious hypocrites at the church and refused to displaying emotion, yet possessed a touch of dreamy, sentimental tenderness. It was Hopkins Sr who furiously resented how they were forced cap-in-hand to their rich relatives such as Aunt Patty, whose husband knew Nye Bevan and could get the young Anthony into a prestigious academy: “Because they're bloody rich!” he exclaims in the car on the way there. “We are all expecting handouts! Total garbage, that's all it is!”

The grovelling paid off, for a while. Hopkins was a hopeless student in his new institution. But one day in a literature class he needed to deliver John Masefield's poem known as The West Wind – without seeing it first – and his voice awakened; he stunned the teacher and his classmates. He convincingly states that verse, by itself, started his career. Combined with participating in the dramatic society at the YMCA. Notably, he graduated a no-hoper, entered the acting world, and amazingly to his parents, was on stage with the great Olivier at the Old Vic in under a decade. He largely achieved it alone, even though back then scholarships existed for drama school – a way up for working-class actors. His dad remained in awe with Anthony's worldwide acclaim: 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.

Concerning the volatile, bloody-minded son, he departed the theatrical troupe out of frustration – causing Olivier's regret and disapproval – but fortunately found an excellent television part as a suspected war criminal in Leon Uris's QB VII, which eventually resulted to roles such as in David Lynch's The Elephant Man and a thriving starry career in cinema, that he favored over theater. He stopped drinking during the mid-70s once a notorious drinker, and so survived into middle age to achieve remarkable acting, such as Lecter, the servant Stevens in The Remains of the Day alongside Emma Thompson and the senior with memory loss in the movie The Father – his second Oscar.

In the later sections of the memoir his personality becomes more opaque, more studied. Certain stories aren't entirely successful. He recalls being taken out to lunch with his fellow actor in Stone's Nixon, the much-respected actor Paul Sorvino, who sought to advise him his acting as Nixon was falling short. Was this the chance for him to absorb something from the legendary star of Scorsese's Goodfellas? Hardly. Anthony appears to agree with Stone's dismissal that Sorvino was acting by jealousy. Is that so?

He repeatedly performs the tough, down-to-earth professional actor who believes you must to be on time, learn everyone's name on set and get on with it. Quite so. But he also recounts standing up to an unpleasant filmmaker who brought a background actor to tears: “Say sorry to her! And develop some respect. If you ever repeat that in front of me, I'll change the shape of your face! He appears to be an individual who stopped drinking but possibly not the combativeness that went with it. A Shakespearean like him must know the lines about Kent from Cornwall from the play Lear: “He does not know how to flatter! An honest mind and plain – he always tells the truth!”

Anthony ends his memoir with an extensive addendum composed simply