It may have involved “just 16 minutes of screen time”, but Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 film “The Silence of the Lambs” was “one of the great performances”, said Ed Potton in The Times.
With his “hiss-slurp” modelled on the sound Bela Lugosi’s Dracula made when he saw blood, and his smile based on Joseph Stalin’s, Hopkins was so convincing as the cannibalistic psychiatrist that his co-star, Jodie Foster, “was scared of him throughout”. It earned him the first of his two Oscars (the second came in 2021, for his role in “The Father”) and “crowned one of the most illustrious but tortured of acting careers”.
As the 87-year-old relates in his tautly gripping memoir, such success wasn’t bad for a “Welsh kid” whose baker father called him “thick as two short planks”.
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At boarding school (paid for by “wealthy relations”), Hopkins was a “hopeless student”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But when an English teacher asked him to recite a poem, his “voice came to life”: poetry, he says, is what “launched him”. Leaving school a “no-hoper”, he went to Rada on a grant – and “to the astonishment of his parents was on stage with Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic within 10 years”.
Yet life hasn’t been easy for Hopkins, who was diagnosed with a form of Asperger’s syndrome in his 70s, said Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post. To calm what he calls the “ticktock of voices” in his head, he drank prodigiously as a young man; though he quit in 1975, it was “not before walking out on his first wife and their infant daughter, Abigail” – something he deeply regrets.
He admits he had few friends and he “could turn very nasty”. Unusually for a showbiz memoir, “We Did OK, Kid” is “more concerned with the inner journey than the outer”. But that’s no bad thing: it’s also a “page-turner”.
