Getting on with it

How many memoirs do you know where the final 33 pages are devoted to the memoirist’s favourite poems? (Answer: none — not even those by well-known poets.) This concluding mini-anthology alone indicates that Sir Anthony Hopkins’ new book is both extraordinary and eccentric.

The poetry provides an indirect, final insight into Hopkins’ personality — the kind of person he is or, more importantly, the person he has become. For this is a story about transformation. Not from rags to riches but from sullen, disparaged loner to generous, sociable superstar.

Anthony Hopkins grew up in a small steel town in southern Wales. As a boy, he had a disproportionately big head for his size. His gruff father belittled him for having such a large head with so little in it; his schoolmates called him Elephant Head; all of his teachers believed he was “bloody hopeless.”

Yet he could memorize entire poems and plays and remember obscure facts and even conversations. He played piano with ease. Bewildered and isolated, he approached everyone and everything with “pure dumb insolence.” His motto: Just get on with it.

Hopkins’ life changed when he wandered aimlessly into a play rehearsal at the local YMCA and was given a small part: one line as an angel. His father wept at the performance. Hopkins had found his niche. After a brief stint in the army, he was accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1961 and into Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company in 1965.

Sixty years later, his rise to prominence as an honoured stage, movie and television actor is almost unequalled. He’s appeared in over 50 movies, an equal number of TV dramas and/or series and 20 major stage plays.

His range is astonishing — everyone from Odin, Othello, King Lear and Quasimodo to Picasso, Dickens, Hitler and Hitchcock. Most convincingly and famously, he’s played a cannibalistic serial killer (Silence of the Lambs), a disgraced U.S. president (Nixon), a gentle pontiff (The Two Popes) and an octogenarian with Alzheimers (The Father).

Despite his prodigious memory, regularly displayed, very few of the movies and roles get much of his attention in the book.

Of course, there are anecdotes about Olivier and brief mentions of praiseworthy directors and co-stars. But he only provides revealing details about his acting in his most famous movies. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) gets the most attention — 16 pages. (Best tidbit: he took inspiration for Hannibal Lecter from Dracula as well as HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.) Nixon (1995) gets seven pages. (Director Oliver Stone felt he was perfect because he was as “deranged and paranoid” as Nixon.) Hopkins covers The Remains of the Day (1993) and Howard’s End (1992) in four pages, total. For the rest, almost nothing.

More memorable than Hopkins’ movies was what occurred on Dec. 29, 1975. On that date he gave up drinking.

Before then he was a raging alcoholic, a loner, often “legless with booze.” He was, he confesses, “a vindictive, cynical, insulting, horrible man who burned bridges and hurt feelings.” Now he’s happily married to his third wife, spearheading his own Artist’s Forum to “give back” to his profession by offering aid and advice to young actors.

As a memoir, We Did OK, Kid is lean and carefully selective. When necessary, Hopkins is blunt in his self-assessments. Designed to be more than a mere autobiography, it seems influenced by Alcoholics Anonymous testimony as much as by personal revelations about his accomplishments. It’s an encouragement: we did it, kid; you can too.

Poetry, then, is the book’s final gift from Hopkins: it can be an aid, it can be an inspiration, it can offer solace. It’s all worth reading.

Gene Walz is a retired University of Manitoba film professor.