Anthony Hopkins memoir misses depth his career deserves

Louis Chilton, The Independent

It must be hard writing a memoir if you’re Anthony Hopkins. On screen, the two-time Oscar-winning Welshman has a rare, almost preternatural gravitas; whether he’s reciting King Lear or tearing off someone’s face as Hannibal Lecter, Hopkins makes you pay attention. In prose, however — shorn of his vocal tone, and those shrewd, precise facial muscles — the 87-year-old thespian faces an altogether different challenge.

To this end, it’s perhaps understandable that We Did OK, Kid, Hopkins’s new autobiography, fails to really capture what’s so thoroughly impressive about his life. Using straightforward but not wholly inelegant prose, the book walks readers through Hopkins’s childhood, his journey into acting, his struggles with alcoholism, and his film career — with the lattermost category receiving frustratingly short shrift.

The real currency of any celebrity memoir is candour — either a sort of illuminating self-scrutiny, or else a gossipy willingness to open veins of bad blood. Hopkins largely takes the high road: there is no mention of his famous feud with A Change of Seasons co-star Shirley MacLaine, or his clashes with director Roger Donaldson on the set of The Bounty. Even his recollections about Marvel’s Thor films are gentler and more pragmatic than what he’s said in past interviews.

There are a few exceptions: he describes the late theatre director John Dexter as a “nasty, twisted little sadist” (though later admits a begrudging respect for him), and details an amusing incident in which Hopkins was snidely critiqued by the actor Paul Sorvino on the set of Nixon, only for the rest of the cast to pile brutal and dismissive insults on the Goodfellas star behind his back. Generally, though, Hopkins is averse to spice.

The problem is that We Did OK, Kid is hesitant to really discuss his film career much at all. Some of the passages about Hopkins’s personal life — his complicated and sometimes damaging relationship with his working-class father, the bullying he suffered at the hands of his peers, the breakdown of two of his marriages, his addiction to alcohol and his now-longstanding sobriety — are moving and insightful. One particularly potent section sees him recall his father’s deathbed, when he was asked to recite Hamlet. “I stopped, he lifted his head up and looked at me, still baffled by his son who was so dense in so many ways but so surprisingly bright in this one,” Hopkins writes. In moments like these, the book can be wrenching.

Most of the book, though, is more matter-of-fact, and if you go into it expecting discussions of his films, which is, in all likelihood, the principal reason one might read an Anthony Hopkins memoir, you will be disappointed. While Silence of the Lambs gets the sort of ink that you might expect (“I instinctively sensed exactly how to play Hannibal. I have the devil in me”), many of his best films are glossed over, or elided entirely. There is no mention of working with Francis Ford Coppola in Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Steven Spielberg on Amistad. He offers scant insight into his opinions on David Lynch, having worked with him so famously on The Elephant Man. Hopkins does, however, make time to mention that “Taron Egerton was phenomenal as Elton John in Rocketman”.

Hopkins has never really been particularly closed off when it comes to his own celebrity — in recent years, he’s been a prolific supplier of Instagram videos in which he dances, pulls funny faces, and tries his hand at art. We Did OK, Kid, then, it seldom feels like you’re really learning something new.

The final section of the book comprises 35 pages of verse, curated by Hopkins and written by the likes of Shakespeare and Auden. It offers, perhaps, an oblique look at Hopkins’ mind, psychology and artistry. (On the audiobook version, this is the only section read by Hopkins himself, with the rest being recited by Kenneth Branagh.) But you can’t help but feel slightly short-changed at the lack of real, tangible insights into his work. His is a career that deserves depth — and demands more than what this book delivers.