Anthony Hopkins’s Beckettian Memoir | The New Yorker

Hamlet finds himself in a similar position, to put it mildly, and it is almost comically appropriate that Hopkins' memoir should haunt his father in such a way. “What the hell is wrong with you? You should have your head examined. Can't you do anything useful? You're fucking useless.” This was the sentence passed on Anthony by his father Dick, who was not only a baker, but also a drunkard and a mourner. According to his son, “he had a tremendous amount of energy that never went away.” The most poignant memory on these pages is permeated with terrifying love:

When I was a little boy, he took me with him to deliver bread in an AR HOPKINS AND SON, LTD delivery truck. written on the side; I only saw him in the left profile. Sometimes I felt scared sitting there and hearing the noise of the car engine, gear shifting and sound knock-knock windshield wipers because I couldn't help thinking that my father's face was only on the left side. As a child, I had dreams in which he was not real, but just a walking profile.

Fast forward a few years and you find Dick cheerfully chatting with Laurence Olivier backstage at the theater where Anthony is performing. When Olivier says he was born in 1907, the elder Hopkins replies without hesitation: “The same age as me. We're both going down the damn hill now, aren't we?” Even further back you see him shaking hands with John Wayne at Chasen's in Beverly Hills and on the verge of tears. The final film takes you to Dick's deathbed, where he asks his famous son to read Hamlet. The request is granted and Anthony really can't stop; lines pour out of it. When the flow finally stops, his father looks up and says, “How did you learn all those words?”

Hopkins' most elephantine feature, it turns out, is not the shape of his head, but the size of the memory bank it contains. He is known for knowing his lines (and often all the others) down to the last comma at the very beginning of a production. Hopkins' method, as he reveals in the new book, couldn't be more sound: “Going through the script was like picking up the stones from a cobblestone street one at a time, studying them, and then putting each one back in its place.”

A quick study is an invaluable talent in repertory theater, where Hopkins, with a two-year break for compulsory military service, began his career. He was advised to apply to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and surprised the assessors at his audition by reading one of Iago's speeches from “OthelloAs quietly as possible: a trick Hopkins defines as “inducing each audience member, one by one, into your confidence, and then sharing with them, sentence by sentence, your perfectly rational arguments for terror.” Lecter is waiting. Perhaps this explains why Hopkins then moved back and forth over the years between the great realms of British classical theater and the badlands of cinema with an ease that even Olivier lacked? Not since Alec Guinness has a Shakespearean actor developed such an intimate relationship with the camera. When Lecter licks his finger to better turn the page of a document and winks at Clarice Starling, who visits him in an asylum, we are the real beneficiaries of that wink.

“It's the 20-20-20 rule. Every twenty minutes I look away from the screen at something twenty feet away from me and for twenty seconds I fantasize about a life so different from my own that I forget where I am or what I'm doing.”

Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai

Not that Hopkins is limited to managing fear. In a wonderful welcome note, he calls Lecter both “remote And awake“, and he somehow managed to bring about the same fusion when he was in possession of completely different emotions, such as shyness or despair. Hence the butler in “Rest of the day(1993), who doesn't even want to show what book he's reading, and the mousy husband in 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), who sits down to dinner with his wife: “Very nice. “Very tasty,” he says of the food and looks at his glass of water as if it were a cup of poison. For a moment, we can't tell whether he's going to kill his spouse or move on to dessert. The question here, among the domestic world, is not only what motivates people, but, thanks to Hopkins, whether it is the ticking of a well-wound clock or an unexploded bomb.

The wife at the dinner table is played by Judi Dench, and the joke is that she and Hopkins will soon get together again to star in Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theater in London. Dench, in his recent book on Shakespeare, notes how early the hero dies, leaving the queen without a lover to command the stage, and tells how Hopkins whispered to her, as she mourned him in the throes of grief: “While you are filming the fifth act, I will go and have a cup of tea in my dressing room.”