Review of We Did Ok, Kid memoir by actor Anthony Hopkins

Before the Oscars, before Hannibal Lecter, before sobriety saved his life, there was a small boy on a windy Welsh beach. That is where Anthony Hopkins begins his searing memoir, We Did Ok, Kid. There is a touch of British writer Richmal Crompton’s William Brown series of books in Hopkins’ telling of his life story.

It might seem a strange connection given the harrowing details of the two-time Oscar winner’s tough childhood, his struggles with alcohol, and his estrangement from his only daughter. However, there is an echo of William, the 11-year-old in Crompton’s books, in the photograph of a cherubic three-year-old Hopkins on Aberavon Beach in Wales, smiling tentatively at his happy, dapper baker father, Richard Hopkins, that gave the book its name.

Hopkins writes that looking at the photograph now he is prompted to tell the little boy, “We did Ok, kid.” That three-year-old boy who started crying when the lozenge his father’s friend gave him fell into the sand, brings to mind the naughty school boy who unfailingly said “Villum” when his long-suffering mother asked him who he loved best.

Hopkins’ vivid imagination, which caused his father to worry that he would never make anything of himself, is also reminiscent of William’s many adventures in school and his beloved village, as is Hopkins’ adoption of “dumb insolence” when faced with unreasonable authority.

Enter Shakespeare

Anthony Hopkins in The Father.

We Did Ok, Kid follows Hopkins from his first encounter with the world of acting in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet — there is that memory of William doggedly declaiming “to be or not to be” while the teachers scramble to get him off stage, to studying in the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff, two years of compulsory national service between 1958 and 1960, and studying at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art).

In between, he met Richard Burton, when Burton came to pick up Hopkins’ neighbour, Bernice Evans, who was teaching Hopkins art, for a movie. The 10-year-old Hopkins was drawing a pirate (William again!) “wearing a red spotted bandana and brown leather boots.” Burton saw the drawing and said with his blue eyes twinkling he liked the boots. Just before leaving drama school where he “lumbered through the two-year-course” Hopkins watched a performance of Look Back in Anger where Jimmy Porter was “played by an astonishing actor called Peter O’Toole.”

Anthony Hopkins in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

It was during the RADA audition, when Hopkins played Iago, that he “suddenly knew how to play a diabolical villain… delivering a perfectly rational argument for terror. I gave the quietest delivery possible without being inaudible.” It was a lesson he carried through to his Oscar-winning performance as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. 

Playing Hannibal Lecter

The book tells of Hopkins meeting the director Jonathan Demme and telling him of his plan to play Lecter “like HAL the computer” in 2001: A Space Odyssey… Quiet and intimate… At once remote and awake.”

Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins in The Bounty.
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Hopkins details the circularity of his life, from O’Toole getting him his first film part in A Lion in Winter to auditioning before Olivier for the National Theatre, “the same man who as a sad boy I’d seen on screen in Hamlet.”

A still from A Lion in Winter.

Olivier was the best kind of mentor to Hopkins, telling him, “You are the star of the show. You’re the only one speaking at that moment,” and “Nerves is vanity, you’re wondering what people think of you? To hell with them! Just jump off the edge.”

Even as Hopkins’ star was rising, his personal life was a mess, holding grudges, brawling, getting lost in the bottle and walking out of his first marriage and infant daughter, “who always lit up” when he was in the room. Hopkins writes of these lows with a fierce honesty, of how he drove the car in a drunken blackout. That was one blackout too many, and “The craving to drink left me. That was eleven o’clock on 29 December 1975.” And Hopkins has been sober since then.

A still from The Silence of the Lambs. 

The book does not feel self-indulgent, as Hopkins looks at his life and choices in that clear-eyed way that is irresistible. The 88-year-old thespian writes of his impatience with labels when discussing his wife Stella’s belief that he may have Asperger’s. “She is probably right,” he says. Never having been formally diagnosed, and with the dislike of therapeutic jargon of a “stoic man from the British Isles,” he prefers the “more meaningful designation: cold fish.”

He is generous with praise for his fellow actors and directors even if he is not very convinced by CGI, writing, “I wouldn’t say it’s deadening but I prefer to be on location in a real place with real people.” The book is quite funny too, with mentions of the superior acting prowess of Bart the bear and Steven Spielberg, who filmed Hopkins’ U.S. citizenship ceremony, telling a woman in the audience that he “does bar mitzvahs as well!”

The book is peppered with photographs and closes with a section of Hopkins’ favourite poetry. Special mention must be made of the audiobook, which is an aural treat read by Kenneth Branagh, with Hopkins reading the poetry. The book is an un-blinkered look at a phenomenal career and an actor who has made peace, somewhat, with his demons. At the end of the book, one wonders if William Brown would have followed in Hopkins’s creative, stubborn and celebrated footsteps and the echo answers, perhaps.

mini.chhibber@thehindu.co.in

Published – January 30, 2026 11:49 am IST