🔗 Share this article

Many consider it the most memorable entrance in film history – and he remains utterly motionless.

Clarice Starling, new to the job, navigates a corridor of cells arriving at the notorious doctor's secure glass tank. He is positioned, appearing as a skeletal visage filled with sinister intent, eerily immobile wearing a snug blue prison jumpsuit. He doesn't move right up until he lunges at the barrier, emitting that distinctive snarling-hissing noise. Countless real-crime films have since shown that actual serial killers are often very boring, lacking anything like Hopkins' powerful on-screen charisma.

He wasn't exactly unrecognized at the time he got the part that won him an Oscar in the iconic film back in 1989: it wasn't his debut, instead, a superstar was forged. His portrayal of Lecter was inspired, the actor happily remembers in this new autobiography, on the classic Dracula, on Stalin as recalled by his daughter, and on his own strictly demanding acting coach Christopher Fettes. There was also a paternal-filial aspect within the narrative; a difficult topic for the actor, who further explains how his Lear was indirectly affected by an agonised guilt concerning Abigail, his distant daughter from his initial marriage in 1966 to Petronella Barker, who resented his time away and drinking.

The title originates from an old wartime photo of a young Hopkins with his father at the seaside – the kid who maybe thought he couldn't make it. He was a bewildered, isolated and sensitive child raised in Port Talbot, his father was Richard Arthur Hopkins, the memorable figure in the narrative: a bread-maker and man's man, a straightforward talker who despised the religious hypocrites of the chapel and avoided showing his emotions, yet possessed a touch of dreamy, sentimental tenderness. It was Hopkins Sr who furiously resented how they were forced cap-in-hand to their wealthy relations like Auntie Patty, who was connected to the famous Bevan and could get Anthony as a boy into a posh school: “Because they're bloody rich!” he exclaims in the car on the way there. “We're all hoping for some pickings! Absolute nonsense, that's the truth!”

The grovelling paid off, for a while. Hopkins was a hopeless student in his new institution. But one day during an English class he was required to perform John Masefield's poem known as The West Wind – sight unseen – and his voice awakened; he amazed the instructor and his classmates. He says quite plausibly that poetry, on its own, launched him. This, along with enrolling in the dramatic society at the YMCA. Remarkably, he left school with low prospects, went into acting, and shocking his family, was on stage with Laurence Olivier at the famous theater within 10 years. He more or less did it on his own, though at that time scholarships existed to attend Rada – a way up for working-class actors. His father was always amazed by his son's international fame: when he asked Anthony to recite the Yorick speech from the play Hamlet, Richard listened carefully and then retreated to another room and burst into tears.

As for the hot-tempered, bloody-minded son, he left the National Theatre out of frustration – much to Olivier's disappointment and criticism – but stumbled upon a memorable TV character as a potential war criminal in the show based on Uris's work, which paved the way to roles such as in Lynch's The Elephant Man and a luminous film journey on screen, that he favored over theater. He stopped drinking during the mid-70s having been a hell-raising alcoholic, and managed to live into middle age to execute great performances, including Lecter, the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day featuring Emma Thompson and the senior with memory loss in the movie The Father – his second Academy Award.

During the second part of the book his character seems more elusive, more calculated. A few tales doesn't quite come off. He remembers being taken out to lunch by his co-star in Oliver Stone's Nixon, the highly regarded performer Paul, who intended to inform him his portrayal of Nixon was falling short. Was this the chance for him to absorb something from the legendary star of Scorsese's Goodfellas? Hardly. He tends to concur with the director's criticism of Sorvino as driven by jealousy. Is that so?

He consistently acts as the no-nonsense, practical performer who maintains it is one's responsibility to arrive punctually, remember every crew member's name and get on with it. Quite so. Yet he also tells confronting an obnoxious director who'd made a young extra cry: “Apologize to that girl! And develop some respect. Should you ever act that way in front of me, I'll change the shape of your face! He appears to be a person who quit alcohol but maybe not the belligerence that went with it. A Shakespearean like him must know Cornwall's lines on Kent in King Lear: “He is incapable of flattery! A truthful and simple spirit – he always tells the truth!”

He finishes his autobiography with a lengthy appendix composed simply