Sir Anthony Hopkins, outsider actor

Yes, Sir Anthony Hopkins did have a life before The Silence of the Lambs. And after it, too. But most casual moviegoers would be hard pressed to add too many other entries to his filmography. Like his most famous screen creation, the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, Hopkins has always been something of a study in contrasts. As an actor, he sits in the middle of the Venn diagram where the mainstream and the fringe overlap, seemingly as happy to mug his way through the Transformers franchise as to direct and star in a project like 1996’s August, a drily worthy adaptation of Uncle Vanya that barely registered on the sordidly commercial level.

He has done all this through a powerful mix of supreme professionalism (he’s the sort of actor who knows not only his own lines, but everyone else’s, too), constant work, versatility and setting himself slightly apart from the other cast members. “I don’t have a single friend who’s an actor,” he writes by way of self-analysis, of which there’s quite a lot.

Indeed, Hopkins lingers on his own unloveliness, at least up to the point in his life, around his 40th birthday, when he quit alcohol. A youthful brawler both on the streets of his native South Wales and while doing National Service in the British army, he was once asked by a sympathetic commanding officer why he behaved as he did. “I don’t know, sir,” Hopkins replied. “I just seem to cause trouble. I’m a bit stupid.” The fractious reputation followed him through his early days in semi professional provincial theater and then the refined halls of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Hopkins’s talent was obvious, and in due course he was spotted by Laurence Olivier, who made him his understudy in a production of August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death. After he stood in for the great man one night, Olivier complimented him for having “walked away with the part like a cat with a mouse between his teeth.” But the young Hopkins was already bored by the repetition of the stage. “I began to feel that acting was just a by-product,” he writes. “I wanted to find value in the rest of my life.”

Pleasure in someone’s performance on stage or screen carries no guarantee of personal fulfillment and, whatever his professional achievements from the mid-1960s onwards, Hopkins clearly found difficulty in getting on with the rest of the world. He walked out on his first wife and their infant daughter and remains estranged from the girl, his only child. By his own admission, he was spiteful, cynical and not a little neurotic. Arriving in New York, he fell into the habit of walking down the sides of the busy Manhattan streets rather than on the sidewalk. “If I had confessed the reason, they might have locked me up,” he writes. “I was afraid that somebody would do a suicide jump from a high window and fall on top of me.”

And the drink. It’s a flood, at least in the first half of the book. “I became one of those good old looking-for-trouble drunks,” Hopkins says. “I was loaded and ready to go, full steam ahead, Tugboat Annie. I’m Popeye the Sailor Man, and I am what I am I am, and I’m Tony the Tiger Man, the tiger, the tiger, the tiger burning oh so bright in the Welsh forests of the night.” (There’s quite a lot more like this in the book.)

Eventually Hopkins discovered Alcoholics Anonymous, settled down with a good woman and moved to a clifftop mansion in Malibu. He still acts, of course, although like many in his profession he apparently longs to be acclaimed for something else. As a result, there’s a generous amount here about his passion both for painting and classical music, the latter of which saw him release an album with the unambiguous title Composer. As an actor, Hopkins has always been of the less-is-more school, imbuing his most malign characters with an air of sinister control rather than going full Freddy Krueger. He brings a similar note of restraint to his memoir. There’s a good deal of reflection on his solitary upbringing in Wales and his consequent sense of being one of life’s permanent outsiders – and not much by way of riotous Hollywood anecdotage. Anyone looking for dirt on any of Hopkins’s fellow cast members may be disappointed, although he does allow himself a few disobliging remarks on the late actor Paul Sorvino (the wiseguy Paulie in Goodfellas), with whom he worked, unhappily, in Oliver Stone’s Nixon.

When he’s on form, Hopkins’s gift for portraying the essential strangeness of the acting profession can be compared to that of Alec Guinness in his own wonderful memoirs. If you’re able to skim the occasional longueurs about man’s struggle for existence and the protracted descriptions of the way the dappled light falls through the trees, and so on, there are gems of genuine pathos awaiting discovery. Just be wary should Hopkins happen to call you with an excitable proposal about “having an old friend for dinner.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.