Taming the monster in me

Actor's moment of reckoning with his booze demons, New book charts rise of a Welsh lad to an Oscar winner

- - MARK JEFFERIES

SIR Anthony Hopkins says he came face-to-face with the monster that exists inside all of us 50 years ago, when he drove blackout drunk for 500 miles all night.

But that dodged potential tragedy shocked him to the core and, finally, after a spiralling battle with alcohol that was heading at least to career suicide, if not death, he sought help.

Hopkins had driven all night from Arizona to Beverly Hills. His next trip was to Alcoholics Anonymous.

"I was driving my car in a complete alcoholic blackout, and I could have killed someone or killed myself, but to take out an entire family in a car crash, in a blackout..." he recalls.

"It was December 1975, just coming up to 50 years ago, and I said to somebody, I need help. And I made the phone call.

"And suddenly, a bright morning of the 29th of December, 1975, something said it is all over. Now you can start living. It has all been for a purpose.

"Whatever that was, subconscious, or whatever it is, or destiny, God, whatever you want to call it, the craving left. It has never come back."

The two-time Oscar winner, now 87, charts his journey to sobriety in his new autobiography, We Did OK, Kid.

"In those days, being an actor, you know, you are a rebel, and everyone wanted to be Marlon Brando or James Dean, and so drinking was a tribute.

"You would get fun to a point.

"I was lucky to hear a little voice one day say, 'It is going to kill you.'

"I was beginning to lose control of my life. I would pick fights. I would attack directors if they dared to look at me the wrong way, and they had a right because they were directing.