This engaging, tersely written memoir from a plausible contender for best actor of his generation looks to take us from belligerence, alcoholism and self-loathing into a place of relative calm and acceptance. Sure enough, one spends a good part of the first 150 pages wondering why Anthony Hopkins is so angry. “What’s the point of closeness to anyone?” he spits as a child (in his own italics). “You get ripped apart in the end.”
True, Hopkins, son of a baker, was underappreciated at his school in south Wales. Seen as dim and disconnected – Stella, his beloved wife, believes him to have Asperger syndrome – he won few admirers until an inspired reading of John Masefield’s The West Wind caught a teacher’s attention.
Amateur theatre led to a scholarship at Cardiff College of Music and Drama. National Service (he was among the last to get caught in that net) interrupted his career, but, shortly after release, he moved on to Rada and understudying Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre.
A lot of life intervened between that early surge and later triumphs in films such as Howards End, The Remains of the Day and – securing the first of two Oscars – The Silence of the Lambs. He was a drinker, but not a hellraiser in the class of near-neighbour Richard Burton. “I missed the joyful frenzy of 1960s London almost entirely,” he writes. “I preferred drinking alone.”
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Hopkins regrets continuing estrangement from his daughter, Abigail, after walking out on her mother in 1973. He burnt professional boats by abandoning a production of Macbeth at about the same time. An uneasy sort of order was restored when he gave up the booze in 1975.
The second half of We Did OK, Kid, detailing half a century of near-unbroken success, is, unsurprisingly, a deal less feverish than the first. We get some insights into the great roles. (He based Hannibal Lecter’s voice on that of Hal, the supercomputer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
We get occasional reminders that the bellicose Hopkins still lurks within the reformed man. “Touch me like that again and I’ll smash your face right into the back of your head!” he barked at Mickey Rourke when that actor got too physical on set. But the final impression is of a man at believable peace with himself.
