Book Review: We Did Ok, Kid: A memoir by Anthony Hopkins

Jon Gower

Anthony Hopkins is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of Wales’ most successful actors.

Still working strong, most recently on set in Dolgellau, his career has included two Oscars and great garlands of praise for his work on stage and screen, in films such as Howard’s End, The Remains of the Day, The Elephant Man and The Father and plays including King Lear, Pravda and Equus.

My daughter Onwy, who watches on average a film a day, considers The Silence of the Lambs to be her favorite movie, in which, she avers, Hopkins as the cold-hearted cannibal Hannibal Lecter is ‘phenomenal, world class. You watch it and he’s dead behind the eyes the entire time.’

In Hopkins’ memoir We Did Ok, Kid, the Port Talbot born and raised star shares his fear of spiders and a specific memory of turning on the light one night in his father’s bakery to find ‘a huge black spider – patient and still, yet completely alert at the same time. I almost jumped through the roof.’

That was the very effect he wanted to have on the filmgoer watching Jonathan Demme’s account of Thomas Harris’ scary novel. ‘I wanted to be the spider in my father’s bakery, so that as soon as the camera was on him, he revealed to be all readiness and all stillness too. Staring at people for a long time makes them very uneasy. Remoteness draws the witness – or victim – forward and into the circle of the predator’s personality.’ 

Hopkins thinks his wife Stella is probably right when she suggests he has Asperger’s syndrome, given his proclivity for memorization – he is able to learn his words so that they are seemingly hard wired into his memory – and repetition and his lack of emotionality.

But being a stoic he prefers to stick what he sees as a more meaningful designation, that of being a cold fish.

Within the pages of this briskly written and totally engaging life story we learn a lot about the art and craft of acting, especially in his account of a series of meetings he had with aspiring actors.

He advised they should all watch the greats such as Humphrey Bogart who said ‘Acting is six feet behind the eyes.’ Hopkins’ main suggestion to the aspiring thesbians was ‘to work hard, with a passion or even an obsession. Then it became the wonderful game, the play of life upon life itself.’

We get the life story, too, of course. The steeltown upbringing made hard by being dimissed as a dunce by teachers in primary school and being mocked by kids on the street for the size of his elephantine head. We visit, in memory the ‘brick prison’ of his boarding school where he was summoned to the front of the class to read out some poetry, which he did so well his teacher gave him the book.

There is conscription into the British Army and also the Cardiff years, studying acting as a student at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, then RADA and, just a few years later sharing the stage with the great Laurence Olivier after he’d been invited to join the ensemble of actors at the National Theatre. 

One of the special encounters of what has been a very fulfilling life was one with Richard Burton, who had returned home to visit his sister Cissy.

When Hopkins arrived Burton teased him about not being able to speak Welsh, or know that there was a rugby match being played that afternoon between Wales and France in Cardiff Arms Park.

Despite the gentle teasing, Hopkins watches Burton and his wife Stella walk to their grey Jaguar car and thinks ‘That’s what I want to be.’ 

Hopkins’ memoir charts a life that spans a time as a young boy when he believed he was an impostor and never had a high opinion of himself to the stage now where he can look back and hope he’s found a way to be slightly kinder and gentler, more self-aware and forgiving than his father and grandfather. 

We Did Ok, Kid has highs and lows and quite a lot of the latter, as Hopkins delineates a life full of loneliness, not that he dislikes being left alone. We read about his life-affirming love affair with Shakespeare, who ‘laid some version of a hand on my shoulder from the first moment I first heard his words spoken.’

He also shares his passion both for painting and for music – Hopkins is a keen pianist and composer of works for symphony orchestra – but we also chart his deleterious struggles with booze, the rivulets of whisky and the two-day tequila jags. His generation thought nothing of going on stage after a long liquid lunch and would sometimes not be able to recall being on stage at all. 

It’s a life lived, according to Hopkins, ‘by the old adage “Trust in God but keep your gunpowder dry.” Live and let live, but keep your running shoes close for the big skedaddle. The Grim Reaper always gets us the runner in the end, but he might as well make him chase us.’

His running days may be over but Anthony Hopkins can survey a life very much fulfilled. He proved his dad wrong when he dismissed his son as being hopeless before that son dreamed a great future for himself and gathered that glorious future to himself.

‘Perchance to dream: ay that’s the rub,’ as Shakespeare puts it in Hamlet. This fine book proves that Hopkins did precisely that. He lived the dream.

We Did Ok, Kid: A memoir by Anthony Hopkins is published by Simon & Schuster and is available from all good bookshops.