THE PLAYER KING

Anthony Hopkins looks back.

- BY ANTHONY LANE

The percussive, peremptory music of Hopkins's speech also marks the curt reckonings of his memoir.

Herod, Hitchcock, Hitler, Nixon, Picasso: pick one of history's great softies, and there’s a good chance that he’s been played by Anthony Hopkins. Also on the list are Dickens, Danton, Freud, Yitzhak Rabin, John Quincy Adams, Pope Benedict XVI, St. Paul, C. S. Lewis, and the man who—though this is a matter of crunchy controversy—invented cornflakes. Last year, at the age of eighty-six, Hopkins appeared as the Roman emperor Vespasian on TV, in “Those About to Die,” the thrust of his performance being to treat the show's title with scorn. Even his portrayal of a man with advanced dementia, in “The Father” (2020), which won the Academy Award for Best Actor, emitted a disconcerting power. Vital signs were rampant. Human twilight, with Hopkins in charge, became a noonday blaze.

Those who wish to trace that radiance to its source now have a map to guide them. “We Did OK, Kid” (Summit) is a memoir composed by Hopkins—ghostlessly, it would seem, for there is no mention of a coauthor. True, he tells us that “my life has been written by someone else, not by me,” but this is not a professional admission. He is referring, instead, to the all-consuming puzzle of his existence and wondering whether it is something that has befallen him, like an accident or a lottery win, rather than a series of events that he has consciously set in motion. “I look at my life and remember that hapless little boy, and I think, How did all this happen?” Hopkins writes. More than a few readers, poring over their own pasts, may find themselves posing the same question.