Herod, Hitchcock, Hitler, Nixon, Picasso: pick one of history’s great softies, and there’s a good chance that he’s been played by Anthony Hopkins. Also on the list are Dickens, Danton, Freud, Yitzhak Rabin, John Quincy Adams, Pope Benedict XVI, St. Paul, C. S. Lewis, and the man who—though this is a matter of crunchy controversy—invented cornflakes. Last year, at the age of eighty-six, Hopkins appeared as the Roman emperor Vespasian on TV, in “Those About to Die,” the thrust of his performance being to treat the show’s title with scorn. Even his portrayal of a man with advanced dementia, in “The Father” (2020), which won the Academy Award for Best Actor, emitted a disconcerting power. Vital signs were rampant. Human twilight, with Hopkins in charge, became a noonday blaze.

Those who wish to trace that radiance to its source now have a map to guide them. “We Did OK, Kid” (Summit) is a memoir composed by Hopkins—ghostlessly, it would seem, for there is no mention of a co-author. True, he tells us that “my life has been written by someone else, not by me,” but this is not a professional admission. He is referring, instead, to the all-consuming puzzle of his existence and wondering whether it is something that has befallen him, like an accident or a lottery win, rather than a series of events that he has consciously set in motion. “I look at my life and remember that hapless little boy, and I think, How did all this happen?” Hopkins writes. More than a few readers, poring over their own pasts, may find themselves posing the same question.

The little boy, on whose haplessness the older Hopkins never tires of insisting (local kids, he says, used to taunt him as “Elephant Head”), was born on New Year’s Eve, 1937, in Margam, a suburb of Port Talbot, in South Wales. Port Talbot was—and still is, just about—a steel town, but the Hopkins family were bakers. A silver cup bearing the legend “Arthur Richard Hopkins 1924, First Prize for Currant Buns” remains in the possession of Arthur’s grandson Anthony, to go with the gold-plated Oscars that he won for “The Father” and, in 1992, for his performance as Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.” One likes to think that the fastidious Lecter, whom Hopkins went on to play, to decreasing effect, in “Hannibal” (2001) and “Red Dragon” (2002), would consider bun-based excellence to be as laudable as the butchering of mortal flesh.

The first chapter of “We Did OK, Kid” begins not at the start of Hopkins’s life but at a boarding school to which he was sent, for a while, at the age of eleven. Like many actors, he revealed (and survived on) a talent for goofing around, diverting his comrades with impersonations that ranged from Bela Lugosi to Elmer Fudd. The chapter concludes with what he calls an “explosive” occurrence: a screening, in the school’s assembly hall, of Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film of “Hamlet.” Much of the language flew over the head of the young Hopkins, yet, as he now says, “a force had broken into the center of whatever I was.” The mixture of brutishness and bafflement in that phrase is very telling, and it sets a tone for what follows; the whole book represents a struggle—not so much to express himself as to sort out a self worth expressing.

Hamlet, to say the least, was in a similar pickle, and it’s almost comically appropriate that Hopkins’s memoir should be so father-haunted. “What the hell is wrong with you? You should get your head examined. Can’t you do anything useful? You’re bloody useless.” Such was the verdict that was handed down upon Anthony by his father, Dick, who was a boozer and a weeper as well as a baker. According to his son, “He had colossal amounts of energy that went nowhere.” The sharpest recollection, in these pages, is incised with a terrified love:

When I was a young boy he’d taken me on his bread rounds in a delivery vehicle with A. R. HOPKINS AND SON, LTD. written on the side; I saw him only in left profile. I sometimes grew afraid sitting there, hearing the car engine and the gears shifting and the thud-thud of the windshield wipers because I couldn’t shake the idea that there was only a left side to my father’s face. Through my childhood, I had dreams where he wasn’t real, just a walking profile.

Hopkins as a child with his father, Dick Hopkins, a baker from Port Talbot, in Wales.Photograph courtesy Anthony Hopkins

Flick forward a few years, and you come across Dick cheerfully hobnobbing with Laurence Olivier, backstage, at a theatre where Anthony is appearing. When Olivier says that he was born in 1907, Hopkins senior replies, without hesitation, “Same age as me. We’re both going down the bloody hill now, aren’t we?” Further forward still, you find him shaking hands with John Wayne, at Chasen’s, in Beverly Hills, and on the verge of crying. One last flick takes you to Dick’s deathbed, where he asks his famous son to recite “Hamlet.” The request is granted, and Anthony, indeed, is unable to stop; the lines pour out of him. When the flow finally ceases, his father lifts his head and says, “How did you learn all those words?”

The most elephantine thing about Hopkins is not, as it turns out, the shape of his head but the size of the memory bank that it houses. He is renowned for arriving, at the outset of a production, already knowing his lines (and, as often as not, everyone else’s) down to the last comma. The Hopkins method, as he discloses in the new book, could not be more grounded: “Becoming familiar with a script was like picking up stones from a cobblestone street one at a time, studying them, then replacing each in its proper spot.”

Being a quick study is an invaluable knack in repertory theatre, which is where Hopkins, with a two-year interlude for compulsory military service, kicked off his career. 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 quietly as possible: a trick that Hopkins defines as “bringing each member of the audience, one by one, into your confidence, then sharing with them, sentence by sentence, your perfectly rational argument for terror.” Lecter in waiting. Does this explain, perhaps, why Hopkins would then traffic back and forth between the grand realms of British classical theatre and the badlands of the movies, over the years, with an ease denied even to Olivier? Not since Alec Guinness has a Shakespearean actor cultivated so intimate a rapport with the camera. When Lecter licks his finger, the better to turn the page of a document, and winks at Clarice Starling, who is visiting him in an asylum for the criminally insane, we are the real beneficiaries of the wink.