Memoirs of Anthony Hopkins Piketty | The New Yorker

Hamlet was in a similar predicament, to say the least, and it is almost comically appropriate that Hopkins’s diary should be haunted by the father. “What the hell is wrong with you? You should get your head examined. Can’t you do anything useful? You’re useless.” This was the sentence passed on Anthony by his father, Dick, who was a drunkard, a crier, and a baker. According to his son, “He had enormous amounts of energy that didn’t go anywhere.” The most powerful memories in these pages are etched with terrifying love:

When I was a young boy, he would take me on baking trips in a delivery van with AR HOPKINS AND SON, LTD. Written on the side I only saw it in the left profile. Sometimes I would get scared when I would sit there, and I would hear the car engine, gear shifting, and a voice Jingle jingle Of the windshield wipers because I couldn’t shake the idea that there was only the left side of my father’s face. During my childhood, I had dreams where he wasn’t real, just a walking profile.

Fast forward a few years, and you find Dick jovially conversing with Laurence Olivier, backstage, at the theater where Anthony is appearing. When Olivier says he was born in 1907, Hopkins Sr. answers without hesitation: “The same age as me. We’re both going down the fucking hill now, aren’t we?” And ahead, you see him shaking hands with John Wayne, in Chase, in Beverly Hills, on the verge of tears. One final flick takes you to Dick’s deathbed, where he asks his famous son to read “Hamlet.” The request is granted, and Anthony is already unable to stop; The lines flow from it. When the flow finally stops, his father raises his head and says, “How did you learn all those words?”

The most fascinating thing about Hopkins is not the shape of his head, it turns out, but the size of his memory bank. He is known for arriving, at the beginning of a production, to know his lines (and often, everyone’s lines) down to the last comma. Hopkins’ method, as he reveals in his new book, could not have been more consistent: “Getting to know the text was like picking up stones from a cobblestone street one by one, studying them, and then putting each one in its proper place.”

Being a quick study is an invaluable talent in the repertory theatre, which is where Hopkins began his career, with a two-year interlude of compulsory military service. When he was advised to apply to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he surprised the assessors, at his audition, by reciting one of Iago’s speeches, from “Othello,” as calmly as possible: a trick that Hopkins defines as “bringing your confidence to every member of the audience, one by one, and then sharing with them, sentence by sentence, your perfectly rational argument for terror.” Lecter is waiting. Does this explain, perhaps, why Hopkins moves back and forth between the grand realms of British classical theater and the badlands of cinema, over the years, with an ease that even Olivier would deny? Not since Alec Guinness has a Shakespearean actor had such an intimate relationship with the camera. When Lecter licks his finger, he might as well turn the page of the document and wink at Clarice Starling, who visits him in an asylum for the criminally insane. We are the real beneficiaries of the wink.

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

Cartoons by Daniel Kanhai

This is not to say that Hopkins is limited to managing dread. And on a fascinating note, he refers to Lecter as “both”far and Awake“And he somehow manages to conjure the same fusion when he experiences completely different emotions, such as shame or despair. Hence the butler in The Remains of the Day (1993), who is reluctant even to show what book he is reading, and the mousy husband in 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), who sits down to dinner with his wife. “Very nice. “Very delicious,” he says of the food, staring into his glass of water as if it were a cup of poison. For a moment, we can’t tell whether he’ll kill his wife or move on to candy. The issue here, amid domestic peace, is not just what makes people tick, but, thanks to Hopkins, whether the ticking is the ticking of a well-packed clock or an unexploded bomb.

Judi Dench plays the wife, at the dinner table, and the joke is that it is not long until she and Hopkins are reunited to play the title role in “Antony and Cleopatra” at the National Theater in London. In a recent book on Shakespeare, Dench points out this early The hero expires, leaving a loverless queen to command the stage, and tells of Hopkins whispering to her, as she misses him in the midst of lamentation, “While you do the fifth act, I’ll go and have a nice cup of tea in my dressing room.”