Therapy plays havoc with the modern celebrity memoir – all the mess of life and fame, so neatly processed. The books you really want to read, big of print and gaudy of title, are those in which motivations remain half glimpsed, major life events are left hanging in a sentence or two, and culpability is met with a shrug of the shoulders. Like Burt Bacharach’s Anyone Who Had a Heart (2013), where, unable or unwilling to look inwards, the American songwriter handed over a chapter to all his ex-wives and printed their testimonies in a different font.
We Did OK, Kid, the new one by Anthony Hopkins, now 87, is tell-all, tell-nothing in the classic mould, with the vanishing quality of movie stars both known and eternally unknown. There’s a reason for the lack of emotional connective tissue linking his crimes and failings: he was sitting watching Doc Martin with his third wife one night when he realised he had Asperger’s, or something like it. He thinks the terminology is just fashion. “I have chosen to stick with what I see as a more meaningful designation: cold fish.”
Is Hopkins one of the last Hollywood enigmas? Glassy-eyed and once an abusive drunk, he’s known for performances of great delicacy – a major achievement is the recent One Life, in which he plays Nicholas Winton, a kind of British Oskar Schindler, with that rare kind of naturalism that made him seem like a real person surrounded by actors who are acting in a film. On YouTube, he can be seen giving a tech-bro rant about self-belief, chest puffed like a pigeon; he shouted down a New York Times reporter who asked him about his life-long estrangement from his daughter, even though he writes about this in his book.
If I had him in front of me, I’d only want to ask about Hannibal Lecter – and apparently this would be fine, as he has great tenderness for the role. Lecter not only gave him his first Oscar, but he gave him “self-assurance”: as Steve Coogan loves Partridge, Hopkins loves his creation because he helps him accept certain parts of himself. Hopkins, an “elephant-headed” child from Port Talbot, would stare his father down in the rear-view mirror to make him uneasy. Lecter, he decided, would embody “two inner attitudes at the same time that don’t often co-exist – at once remote and awake”, like a spider, poised but ready to move. The clicking consonants of his name brought to mind the computer Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, who inspired the soft, even voice. While the novelist Thomas Harris had Hannibal with an extra finger, Hopkins wanted no monster, and worked all the detail up himself, down to tight prison overalls which Lecter, he thought, would have had tailored himself.
Hopkins has had the strange feeling of “not being able to cope” his whole life: his father, a master confectioner who once got an award for his currant buns, seems to be the seat of his problems, endowing him with a lifelong sense of failure and anxiety. The childhood stare, a pose of “dumb insolence”, was a manifestation of that buried pain and he used it “to drive adults crazy”. He failed at boarding school, and when the house master sneered that his prospects were nothing but “rags and tatters”, Hopkins loved the lyricism, the same way he loved the clickety-click.
From what I understand – and the description in the book is sparse – he appears to have reacted to his teacher’s insult by springing around the classroom shouting: “Hush hush hush! I am what I am what I am! I am the Rags and Bones and Tatters man!” This then became something of a routine throughout his school years. It remains my lasting impression of Anthony Hopkins now. And it’s even stranger than Hannibal, with his pigeon chest, behind the prison glass.
[Further reading: Laura Mulvey returns to the male gaze]
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