Anthony Hopkins’s revealing memoir, We Did Okay Kid, chronicles his childhood, battles with alcohol, and his ascent on stage and screen. Photo / Getty Images
From his estranged daughter to battles with alcohol, We Did Okay Kid makes for melancholic reading.
He has been a chianti-quaffing serial killer, Thor’s disappointed dad Odin and an emotionally repressed butler in James Ivory’s searing adaptation of The Remains of the Day. But what does the world know about the real Anthony Hopkins?
Less than we might think, judging by his revealing new memoir, We Did Okay, Kid. Suffused with melancholy, the book chronicles Hopkins’ difficult childhood in Port Talbot, Wales, where a teacher branded him a “dunce” and the kids on his street mocked his abnormally large head.
Soon to turn 88, he writes about feeling distant from others throughout his life, his punishing battles with booze, and his unlikely – at least as he sees it – ascent on stage and screen, first as a protege of Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre, and later as one of Hollywood’s favourite character actors.
Here are seven things we learnt from We Did Okay, Kid.
Hopkins became instantly synonymous with the grisly serial killer Hannibal Lecter when the first Silence of the Lambs movie was released in 1991. But before reading the script, he wasn’t aware of Lecter or his creator Thomas Harris. He assumed that the story was a family-friendly affair about animals. “Silence of the…what was it,” he recalls saying to his agent. “Is it a children’s film?”
Informed it was a “kind of crime film”, he started reading, but stopped at page 15. Not because there was anything amiss – but because it was one of the best screenplays he’d ever read. Unless there was a firm offer for the part of Lecter, he couldn’t bear to carry on. As it turned out, American director Jonathan Demme was determined to cast Hopkins and flew to London to offer him the job.
Hopkins’ already rocky marriage with his first wife, Petronella Barker, took a plunge when Hopkins returned from a long day of filming in Scotland. They immediately got into a blazing row: “I have never been physically violent, but in that moment I was filled with such revulsion that I became afraid for both myself and her.” Their daughter, Abigail, was 14 months at the time. He kissed her goodnight before leaving his family, never to return; he and Barker divorced not much later, in 1972.
After conquering his alcoholism, Hopkins tried to repair his relationship with Petronella and Abigail, flying from his new home in Los Angeles to London in 1977. But it was to no avail: “The meeting was awkward… They didn’t want to be there. Throughout the meal, they keep catching each other’s eyes and making faces. Abigail never seems able to forgive me for leaving the family when she was a baby.”
He admits to having spoken coldly about his daughter in public – and references a “regrettable interview” where he said that he did not know whether she was married or had children and did not care. But their estrangement remains “the saddest fact of my life and my greatest regret… that hardness is my default… I hope my daughter knows that my door is always open to her,” he concludes, vaguely. “I want her to be well and happy.”
Despite warnings that he would never work again, Hopkins couldn’t bear to continue his run as the lead in the National Theatre’s 1973 production of Macbeth. He felt that the director John Dexter was far too disrespectful:
“What made the show intolerable were the vicious snipes… [Dexter’s] jabs were not going to stop, so what was the point in sticking around?”
As word got out, his friend and mentor Laurence Olivier, the National’s founding director, called. “You’re being quite foolish. On your own head be it, dear boy.”
But his retirement proved short-lived. A few weeks later, Hopkins was offered a part in a US television adaptation of Leon Uris’s QB VII, about a doctor accused of working for the Nazis in Auschwitz. His agent told him that he was “born under a lucky star”.
The actor describes drinking as “a family tradition” – one he took to extremes. He dimly recalls a “terrible early 1970s film” of which he has no clear recollection of having acted in, though his name appears in the credits. “No one in that movie could remember a minute of doing it: we’d all been blackout drunk.”
A few years later, his drinking was out of control. Hopkins reached rock bottom in the mid-1970s when he drove “in a drunken blackout through Beverly Hills”. He writes: “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.” Realising he’d had a lucky escape, he went teetotal.
Hopkins credits Jennifer Lynton, to whom he was married from 1973 to 2002, with helping him overcome his alcoholism – though he had a strange way of expressing gratitude, divorcing her in 2002 after he began to feel trapped in their relationship. (He married his third wife, Stella Arroyave, a year later).
“She was married to someone who was not to be trusted,” he writes. “She turned a blind eye to whatever I was up to. It was only years later that she knew about my infidelities. I don’t know whether she took a lover too. I rather hope she did. I would never blame her for it.”
Hopkins knew that Oliver Stone had a maverick reputation, but he was still baffled when the director cast him as Richard Nixon in his 1995 biopic. What could a Welshman with classical theatre training bring to the role of a disgraced US president?
His misgivings were not helped when co-star Paul Sorvino (who played Nixon’s confidante Henry Kissinger) took Hopkins aside after an early table read and told him that he was making a mess of the part. “Your voice was all wrong… your speech patterns are way off.” Remember that Hopkins was an Oscar winner by then. And yet he nonetheless took the critique to heart and asked Stone to fire him, saying, “I don’t want to spoil your film”.
Stone immediately guessed that Sorvino had been undermining Hopkins’ confidence. “Has that fat slob been getting to you? You don’t have to answer. I know he was. He’s a baby. Don’t take any notice of him.” Hopkins was convinced to stay the course, and by the time filming began, he could “feel Nixon’s presence almost as if he were looking over my shoulder, nudging me on”.
Hopkins has always been a loner – as a young actor, he preferred drinking alone over the company of other thesps, and as a Hollywood star, he has firmly avoided the social circuit. He also has a longstanding habit of learning an entire script off by heart, to the point where he can recall other actors’ lines as readily as his own.
However, Hopkins only began to suspect he might be neurodivergent when he watched ITV medical comedy-drama Doc Martin, in which Martin Clunes plays a doctor who is widely understood to be autistic. “[My wife Stella’s] belief that I probably have Asperger’s is likely right, given my proclivity for memorisation and repetition and lack of emotionality.” But Hopkins prefers not to use psychiatric definitions, and rather thinks of himself as simply a “cold fish”.
We Did Okay, Kid: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster) is on sale now.