‘I knew I
needed help. I knew it was over’
alcoholism,
anger, Academy Awards – and 50 years of sobriety
Anthony
Hopkins
The big
interview
‘I knew I
needed help. I knew it was over’: Anthony Hopkins on alcoholism, anger, Academy
Awards – and 50 years of sobriety
As the
actor approaches his 90th year and publishes an autobiography, he reflects on
his early years on stage, being inspired by Laurence Olivier, becoming a
Hollywood star and conquering his demons
Steve
Rose
Mon 3 Nov
2025 05.00 GMT
‘What’s
the weather like over there?” asks Anthony Hopkins as soon as our video call
begins. He may have lived in California for decades but some Welshness remains,
in his distinctive, mellifluous voice – perhaps a little hoarser than it once
was – and his preoccupation with the climate. It’s a dark evening in London but
a bright, sunny morning in Los Angeles, and Hopkins is equally bright in
demeanour and attire, sporting a turquoise and green shirt. “I came here 50
years ago. Somebody said: ‘Are you selling out?’ I said: ‘No, I just like the
climate and to get a suntan.’ But I like Los Angeles. I’ve had a great life
here.”
It hasn’t
been all that great recently, actually. In January this year, Hopkins’ house in
Pacific Palisades was destroyed by the wildfires. “It was a bit of a calamity,”
he says, with almost cheerful understatement. “We’re thankful that no one was
hurt, and we got our cats and our little family into the clear.” He wasn’t
there at the time; he and his wife, Stella, were in Saudi Arabia, where he was
hosting a concert of his own music played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
They’re now in a rented house in the nearby neighbourhood of Brentwood. “We
lost everything, but you think: ‘Oh well, at least we are alive.’ I feel sorry
for the thousands of people who have been really affected. People who were way
past retirement age, and had worked hard over the years and now … nothing.”
Hopkins
will be 88 this December, but clearly doesn’t consider himself past retirement
age. As a two-time Oscar-winner, a knight of the realm, a fixture of pop
culture and one of the most revered actors alive, he has an embarrassment of
laurels to rest on, but there’s still plenty on his schedule. He’s just
finished a movie with Guy Ritchie, for whom he has a newfound admiration –
“He’s precise in what he wants to see” – and he’s coming back to Britain soon,
he says, to make a new movie with Richard Eyre (The Housekeeper, about Daphne
du Maurier), then another one in Wales.
Nor is he
too old to move with the times. On a recent Instagram video, he put on one of
Kim Kardashian’s much-ridiculed Skims face wraps and channelled Hannibal
Lecter. “Hello, Kim. I’m already feeling 10 years younger,” he announces to the
camera, followed by Lecter’s trademark sinister lisping-slurping action. “Fun,
wasn’t it?” he says, laughing. Kardashian told him she thought it was
hilarious, he says.
But
recently Hopkins has also been looking back, too – at his whole life. His new
memoir, We Did OK, Kid, is far from your stereotypical luvvie memoir, partly
because Hopkins is far from your typical luvvie – even if he does cross paths
with past greats such as Laurence Olivier, Peter O’Toole, Katharine Hepburn and
Richard Burton – but mainly because he’s surprisingly upfront about his often
troubled early life. When he describes his childhood in the Welsh town of Port
Talbot, the only son of a family of bakers, it feels like a different planet.
“My father had that attitude: stop whining, stop complaining, you don’t know
what you’re talking about, stand up straight, get on with it!” His father was
also prone to depression and anxiety, Hopkins says. It was wartime and postwar
Britain; life was just like that.
By his
own account, the young Hopkins comes across as a bit of a loner and an oddball.
He had few friends, was frequently bullied and wouldn’t even go to his own
birthday parties. He showed so little promise at school, one teacher told him
he was “a brainless carthorse”. “I was living in my imagination, my dream
world, I suppose,” he says. “I couldn’t understand anything intellectually or
academically and that drove me into a kind of loneliness and resentment.” He
retreated behind a mask of insolence, “a tough stance and a cold remoteness”,
and that became his identity. Perhaps, in a way, he was already acting?
“Yes,
yes, I think I was,” he says. “The only way I could protect myself was, if I
got a slap across the head from a school teacher, I’d stare them out and I’d
defy them. I wouldn’t react at all.” You can almost picture a young Hannibal
Lecter doing the same.
His
despairing parents had all but written him off, but he told them: “One day,
I’ll show you,” he says. “I discovered that I had one small gift: I could
remember things.” He was an avid reader, and easily retained facts, figures,
whole poems and speeches from plays.
An early
epiphany in terms of acting was seeing Olivier’s film adaptation of Hamlet at
school in 1949, when he was 12. “I was shocked by my reaction,” he says. “I
don’t know what it was about that, but it made such a punch in my head, hearing
Shakespeare for the first time.” He started memorising speeches from Hamlet and
Julius Caesar. His parents were amazed. (Decades later, his father, on his
deathbed, asked Hopkins to recite Hamlet for him.)
Hopkins
even goes as far as wondering if he has Asperger’s or some other form of
autism. As well as his memory, he details behaviour such as repeating words
obsessively and a “lack of emotionality”. He has never sought a professional
assessment. “My wife, Stella, she diagnosed me. She said: ‘Well, you’re
obsessive. Everything has to be laid out perfectly.’ I have to have everything
arranged. So that’s a little twist in the brain, I suppose. But I’m quite happy
with whatever inner disturbance I have.”
Hopkins’
memory is the foundation of his acting, he says. He reads his scripts 100 or
200 times, so every line is etched into his memory before he turns up on set.
It started as a protection mechanism when he was a young actor, but it’s become
his technique. “That was my gift, really: to know the part so well that I had
no fear. Once you know the script, you have a relaxation to go on stage in
rehearsal, so you can hear the other person. The art of acting, I think, is to
be able to listen.”
In 1964,
15 years after being transfixed by Olivier’s Hamlet, Hopkins found himself
auditioning in front of the man himself to join London’s National Theatre
(cheekily, he did Othello, a role Olivier had recently made his own, albeit in
blackface). He considers Olivier his mentor. “He gave me this huge break in my
life. He seemed to admire my physical strength, because I had that in me, and I
had this sense of Welsh danger, you know, quick-tempered.” He didn’t really get
along with the English middle-class chumminess of the British theatre-world,
though – the “kissy-smoochy-darling stuff”, as he puts it. “I’ve never felt
comfortable with that.”
One area
where he did find common ground – far too much of it – was alcohol. “Drinking
was a family tradition,” he says. It was a theatre tradition, too. This was the
era of “angry young men” epitomised by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger
(Hopkins had been riveted seeing Peter O’Toole’s version in 1957), and of
legendary, hard-drinking “hell-raisers” like O’Toole, Oliver Reed, Richard
Burton and Richard Harris. Did he fit that description?
“Yes,
yes, I did. I would not be trusted, and I would have fights and quarrel with,
especially, directors. Looking back, it’s all paranoia. They were trying to do
their job; I was trying to do mine, but I couldn’t take any … it wasn’t
criticism, I couldn’t take any authoritative bullying. So I’d lash out.” He
would often get into physical fights in pubs, too.
The week
before Hopkins’ first marriage, to fellow actor Petronella Barker in 1966, he
impulsively quit the National because of one such director, declaring he was
giving up acting. He recalls his colleagues getting sloshed at the wedding
reception then heading off to perform in the afternoon matinee. He used to do
the same. “Oh yeah, it was terrible. You used to be on stage and not know where
you were or why you were there, adding 10 minutes to the play.”
It was
just the done thing, he says. “Yeah, we are rebels. We can fight. Who cares
about the establishment? When you’re growing up, it’s healthy to want to punch
out and be rebellious and survive. And it was a bit of fun, I thought. But I
remember thinking one day: ‘Yeah, and it’s going to kill you as well.’”
It
certainly took many of his contemporaries. By the mid-70s, even as his career
was going places, Hopkins’ drinking and heavy smoking were taking a toll on his
health – and his relationships. In 1969, after two years of marriage marked by
rows, depression and a lot of whisky, he walked out on Barker and their
one-year-old daughter, Abigail. He describes it as “the saddest fact of my
life, and my greatest regret, and yet I feel absolutely sure that it would have
been much worse for everyone if I’d stayed”. He and Barker divorced in 1972.
The real
wake-up call came in December 1975, in LA. He woke up one morning to find his
car missing, and called his agent to tell him. “Nobody stole it,” his agent
replied. “We found you on the road.” Hopkins had driven all night from Arizona
to Beverly Hills, about 500 miles, blackout drunk. “I was insane, I was nuts, I
couldn’t remember half the journey,” he says. “And that’s a deadly way to live,
because I didn’t care about myself. I could have taken out an entire family … I
knew I needed help, I knew it was over.”
The way
he narrates it, a literal voice in his head asked him if he wanted to live or
die. He replied: “‘I want to live,’ and the voice said, ‘It’s all over now. You
can start living.’” He went straight to Alcoholics Anonymous. Afterwards, “I
got out on the street, 11am, 29 December 1975, and everything looked different.
Everything seemed sunnier, everything seemed more … benign. No threat in the
air.”
He
doesn’t go as far as to claim it was God that spoke to him, but it was “a
moment of clarity”, he says, “from deep inside here [he points to his head] or
here [he points to his heart].” He has never craved a drink since. “We all have
that power within us, and we choose our lives and navigate through that kind of
… inspiration, I suppose it is.”
By this
stage Hopkins was living and working more and more in the US, and in cinema. “I
just wanted some sunshine, and I didn’t want to be standing around in wrinkled
tights holding a spear for the rest of my life,” he jokes. It was his hero
O’Toole who had first coaxed him on to a movie set, in 1968. He knocked on
Hopkins’ dressing room door at the National one day and said, “I want you to do
a test for me,” Hopkins says. “He’d had a few jars, and we went to the pub
afterwards.”
No comments:
Post a Comment