WE DID OK, KID

The legendary Welsh actor pens his memoirs.

In 1949, when he was 11, Hopkins’ parents sent him to boarding school in southeastern Wales. He hated that “brick prison” and its “grim teaching staff,” yet the school gave him his first taste of Shakespeare when it screened Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film version of Hamlet. “I felt that Olivier as Hamlet was speaking to me, referring to some long-vanished, ancient part of myself,” he writes. In this charming if run-of-the-mill memoir, Hopkins charts his progression from the son of a baker who feared his son wouldn’t amount to anything, to a student who prompted headmasters to whack him in the head and claim, “Does anything go on in that thick skull of yours?” to one of the world’s most celebrated actors. Hopkins describes his career progression, starting with a fortuitous visit to the local YMCA and an offer to speak his first-ever line onstage. He recounts his scholarship years at the Cardiff College of Music and Drama, his acceptance to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, his struggles with alcoholism, his years working under Olivier at London’s National Theatre, and his first film role, which came about after Peter O’Toole encouraged him to test for The Lion in Winter. Much of the book’s second half is devoted to Hopkins’ cinema career, including the roles for which he won his Best Actor Oscars, as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and as the titular character in The Father (2020). Much of this material is the standard stuff one finds in celebrity memoirs: A solitary kid who hated school and didn’t fit in anywhere goes on to a distinguished career. Descriptions of film shoots can be sketchy. But Hopkins is an agreeable guide, and there’s ample humor here to entertain, as when he notes that, when his agent offered him the script for The Silence of the Lambs, he asked, “Is it a children’s film?”

A fun if by-the-numbers memoir from a cinema icon.