Read: 2025-11-11
Recommend: 10/10
I was captivated by the musicality of his voice and the poetic quality of his performance. I also appreciated learning about his personal struggles with alcohol and his journey to recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous—it added meaningful depth to his story.
The influence of his father on his life struck me as particularly significant, reminiscent of the father-son dynamic explored in another book, The Running Ground.
His dedication to his craft reminds me of Kobe Bryant’s approach to basketball: both exemplified relentless preparation and an unwavering commitment to excellence through consistent hard work.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Dead and gone now. I don’t know if he exists in another dimension—an afterlife or any of that kind of wishful thinking. But he is deep inside me, like bits of broken china. It is an isolated life. It has always been that way. But no sweat, no big deal. Quite a trip, in fact, ’cause I am not a victim. I have put those fractured pieces to use—loneliness, alienation, anxiety, whatever those shards were. And now I’m glad for them. Those irritants and goads have kept me moving; they got me here.
The more slaps I got, the more I leaned into my survival trick, a gaze of pure, dumb insolence. This look displayed my passive indifference to everything hostile around me. Show no reaction. Stare them down. Pretend they don’t exist. I enjoyed this newly discovered power. Show no pain! Bury what pain there is, push it under the carpet, keep moving. It drove adults crazy, and that suited me fine.
On February 8, 1960, after two years of service, I was booted out into Civvy Street, meaning civilian life. I could complain, I suppose, that the army had been a waste of time, but it wasn’t. I didn’t do much as assistant to the chief clerk of the Sixteenth Light Ack-Ack Regiment, but I’d enjoyed the routine deadness of the days. I liked that nothing was expected of anyone other than that we obey orders.
Outside the Old Vic’s box office, I studied the photographs of the actors in stills of scenes from the current play, The Queen and the Rebels, by Ugo Betti. They all looked like proper actors, intense and serious and very in possession of themselves.
My first impulse, once the lecture was over, was to make a getaway. My father, my old man, slipped into my head. He saw everything as a big fat joke. He thought both pessimism and optimism were useless. They both needed a poke in the eye.
I didn’t want them to know about it back in Wales. I was trying to make up my mind what to do. I couldn’t stay at my parents’ house. They’d help me out, but I didn’t want their help. There would be a price: my father and mother’s disappointment. The last thing I wanted was to be a bearer of letdown and disappointment.
Stan told me that I should use this awareness of mortality as inspiration. “Once you leave home, you’ve left home,” he said. “You’re on your way. No turning back. You’re in the big hungry world now, sink or swim. Whatever it is you want in this life, my son, you just must grab hold of that thought and give it your best shot. If it doesn’t work out in the end, tough luck, so be it. One thing you can’t fail at is death.”
Stanislavski’s system, which he developed in the early 1900s, had the actor reaching for inner motives in the pursuit of a certain task. His method required us as actors to explore our own memories and ask ourselves seven questions about each character we played: Who am I? Where am I? When is it? What do I want? Why do I want it? How will I get it? What do I need to overcome? By one interpretation, the system—Method Acting—involved four processes: relaxation, concentration of attention, imagination, and emotion memory. I never fully embraced the Method in the sense of staying in character for days on end, but this version drew me in. I wound up throwing away so much of what I learned over the years and developed my own methods, but that education gave me a discipline that I’d been lacking as well as a blueprint for how to approach a text in great seriousness.
I gradually created my own method for learning lines. What’s key is that I reread the material again and again, hundreds of times, marking the pages up as I committed them to memory. Once I know the page cold, it gets a star. I’m sure to others, the writing looks like the ravings of a madman, but I assure you it’s a very precise system, and it works for me.
While my sudden splurges of defensive anger have gotten me into trouble at times, they’ve also kept me from being taken advantage of.
That method of preparation has stayed with me throughout my life as an actor. You become a great boxer only by doing endless footwork. I go through the script a thousand times until I get to the point where I know it as well as I know my own name.
Though I would never play Hamlet myself, lines from that play came to me often. On this day, it was this: There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow… If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. The readiness is all! That was it. The power to accept fate and, ultimately, death—therein lay strength. I first read those words way back in the 1950s in that alien boarding school, learning pieces of Shakespeare as if they were gospel. Now I was beginning to understand them. Discipline and craft. Get ready. No more putting myself down. Instead, I began to speak to myself in a new way: Hey, you! Who, me? Yes, you. Enough! No more of that little voice. You know exactly what you’re doing. So get on with it!
And yet I wasn’t nervous. I was young and cocky. I had no nerves. Olivier had given me great advice: “Nerves is vanity. You’re wondering what people think of you? To hell with them! Just jump off the edge.” Being nervous, in other words, meant you were thinking about yourself. Of course, you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t get a little tremor in front of so many pairs of eyes, he said. But you’ve got to take charge of it.
In the evenings, I bought bottles of whiskey at the off-license and took them back to the flat. My depression was boundless; the booze was my pacifier. I brooded. She raged.
I’d made that break a few times but always went back. Now I knew I would never return. The last day of that marriage for me was that day, Saturday, October 25, 1969. The next morning, David and I had breakfast together. “Please don’t try to talk me into going back,” I said. “Into going back?” he said. “Tony, I’m here to persuade you not to return. You did the best you could, but I beg you—my wife and I beg you—don’t go back. Petronella will kill you or you will kill her or you will kill yourself.” I phoned my parents. My mother picked up the phone. “I’ve got some news,” I said. “I’ve left Petronella.” “Oh, thank God for that,” my mother said. They saw that there was no other way, in spite of the devastation that resulted. Aside from sending financial support, I didn’t have contact with Petronella and Abigail for a few years after that. It is the saddest fact of my life, and my greatest regret, and yet I feel absolutely sure that it would have been much worse for everyone if I’d stayed.
Alcoholism is the dictator that drives him to self-pitying despair. In a violent argument about his drinking, Theo shouts: “I can stop drinking any time!” His companion yells back: “Then why don’t you stop?” “Because I don’t want to!” Those two lines hit me in the head. That’s me! I thought.
Looking back, I take no pride in this. I feel only deep sadness. How many lives are destroyed and damaged by drunks? To think now about how many other people—my costars, the director, the producers, the gaffers, my agents—were counting on me to get through that shoot. How cavalier I was with their time and talent. How, for lack of a better word, rude. The appalling arrogance of the alcoholic is matchless. But my ability to deny reality was coming to an end.
My memories of that time are foggy. During my drinking years I had caused a lot of pain. I never had any idea that I was an alcoholic. Rarely does a heavy drinker wake up to that without an intervention of some kind, and even then it takes a while to sink in. Denial is the greatest killer. And I was still in the grips of my addiction, though it was getting harder to deny it.
As I sobered up, I looked up at the eucalyptus trees and thanked God no one had died that night. I imagined my parents back in Wales hearing that I’d killed someone or myself. I saw their hopes smashed. I heard a voice ask me, Do you want to live or do you want to die? I want to live, a voice answered from somewhere deep inside me. Then I heard the voice say, It’s all over now. You can start living. The craving to drink left me. That was eleven o’clock on December 29, 1975. What grace the universe showed me in that moment. How lucky I am to have found clarity at last, to say that I would do everything in my power and call on all other sources of power to never again have a night I didn’t remember, to never again get behind the wheel and endanger others, to never again let that monster creep across the room and up my leg, making me cruel and cold. “I’m an alcoholic and I need help,” I told my agent. He got me the time off I needed to focus on getting treatment.
If you fight alcoholism, it’ll kill you. You have to accept that you are an alcoholic and you are flawed. Once you accept that weakness in yourself, you can breathe. And you gather a support group around you of damaged souls who, like you, are trying not to drink. Some of them have been trying to stay sober for a day, others for decades. Together, we help one another make it through another day of sobriety.
When I kicked the booze and sobered up, I knew I owed apologies to those I’d hurt. There were many cases in which I’d bitten the hand that fed me. I got in touch with former directors and colleagues. I was sick and tired of myself. I was sick to death of my cruelty. I couldn’t change what I’d done, but I could at least do my best to acknowledge the behavior and vow not to do it anymore.
My old man told me over and over: “Never complain. You lot, you young kids, you don’t know you’re born! You have nothing to complain about. Watch animals. Dogs and cats and birds don’t sit around wondering about the purpose of life. They just bloody get on with it. We should too.
I knew they had nothing to worry about because I instinctively sensed exactly how to play Hannibal. I have the devil in me. We all have the devil in us. I know what scares people. The key is to embody two inner attitudes at the same time that don’t often coexist—he was at once remote and awake. I’d encountered those two things in one entity once very early in my life, and it became part of my childhood subconscious. I suffered from a terrible fear of spiders, and unfortunately, ours was an old house with crawling and skittering creatures everywhere. One night I switched on the light in my father’s bakery, and right next to the switch was a huge black spider—patient and still, yet completely alert at the same time. I almost jumped through the roof. That was the effect I wanted to have as Hannibal. I wanted to be the spider in my father’s bakery so that as soon as the camera was on him, he was 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.
Once I began acting on film, I worked hard to become still, because it’s not really in my nature to dwell for a long time in direct, sustained attention. And for this role, I had to cultivate that disposition to the most extreme degree. Hannibal had to be both awake and remote in order to create a spellbinding charisma. The way to that is through stillness.
The night was meaningful for all three of us. Those teachers who had taught me so much and who had been so strict now had no notes, only praise. To hear from my favorite teachers that I’d done well—done very well—made me feel like a little boy being patted on the head and told, at long last, that perhaps he was not such a dunce after all.
We’d bought a house in London, which she far preferred to Los Angeles. She had dolled it up quite beautifully. But I found myself staring at the curtains and thinking, I’m going to die here. I felt trapped in this kind of quasi-luxury. I thought, I’ve got to get out. What it was that I felt closing in on me, I couldn’t say. Perhaps a fear of death. The effect was terrible for her. She was married to somebody who was not to be trusted. She turned a blind eye to whatever I was up to. It was only years later that she knew about my infidelities. I don’t know whether she took a lover too. I rather hope she did. I would never blame her for it. It would be some consolation to know that she found some happiness in those years in spite of me. It was sad because she deserved better than me, she really did. She brought a change in my life, and I blew it. I take full responsibility for that. So I did another runaway, this time from my comfortable London home on Alexander Place in Kensington with Jenni. I did a film in Rome and then went alone to America. I look back on that with regret, sadness. I could have been better, but I wasn’t. When we got divorced, I was a mess. I was on the run from rocky dealings on films, broken relationships with women, my lack of trust, a neurotic insistence on being isolated. Sobriety had saved my life, and yet it felt as if something were dying inside me. How could that be? I had achieved everything I had set out to achieve. I had kicked alcohol. What was it that I still didn’t understand?
Looking out at the hopeful faces in the Anthony Hopkins Artists Forum, all those young people summoned by the Boss, I began by saying that as a rule, I never offered insights into the mysteries of acting, because I didn’t believe there were any. My main suggestion: Work hard, with a passion or even obsession. Then it became the wonderful game, the play of life upon life itself. And at its heart, acting was a job not so much different from any other job. Arrive on time. Don’t keep others waiting. Learn the lines, don’t bump into the furniture, and make sure you’re squared up with your agent and your taxes. I told them: The main thing is to believe in yourself. Believe in what you’re doing. Live as if the future is the present. You need to tell yourself things like I am successful. The way Muhammad Ali said, “I’m the greatest fighter ever,” you must say, “I am the greatest.” I love the Dorothea Brande book Wake Up and Live! Thanks to her, I will often write on my script Act as if it is impossible to fail. Life is in session. This is not a rehearsal for the big event. This is the big event.
If you don’t like the job, sonny boy, give it up! I want to say to them. And beware of that heavy door banging your slick little ass on the way out! Walk down the street, any street of any city block, and see how tough life really is. Witness the daily trudge of people trying to survive. At any supermarket checkout, there are older women bagging groceries for rude, cell phone–gabbing customers who are too busy texting to say “Thank you.” On street corners, old men, veterans from forgotten battlefields, panhandle for cash. Meanwhile, actors make a living by saying, “Let’s all dress up and pretend!”
“Dream big,” I told the forum audience. “Nothing wrong with that. But remember that you are nothing. Your life is really none of your business. My life is none of my goddamn business.” I told them that the important thing was to stay in the game. Whenever someone has tried to engage me in making fun of another actor, I say, “At least he’s doing it! You’re sitting on your ass watching.” I think often of the famous Theodore Roosevelt “Man in the Arena” speech from 1910. It’s a speech my father liked to quote, as did Burt Munro from World’s Fastest Indian. It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
A memory came back to me at that grave: I was standing on a cliff with my father. It was on the Worm’s Head, in Gower, West Wales. I was twelve. I had an urge to jump off the cliff. Perhaps that’s normal. I’ll jump and hit the rocks below. It was just a thought. But as if sensing what was happening in my brain, my father put his hand on my right shoulder. There was rarely physical contact in those days, but he seemed to know I needed it then, and perhaps I need it now as I prepare to learn for myself what the old man called the Big Secret.
Dreams spoken aloud have come true. When my father said I was hopeless, I denied what I was told by him and by my teachers. I said I would show them all, and I did. I dreamed a great future, and in doing so, I gathered a glorious future to me. I’ve found pure joy and freedom in art. I try to paint or draw every day, and I also play the piano every day for about two hours. In my old age, I’ve rediscovered the love of creating purely for its own sake. While I have studied piano, when it comes to visual art, I find that if I think too much, it kills what I love about it. The great Stan Winston, a classically trained painter and sculptor and an Academy Award–winning makeup artist who collaborated with Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, once came over and looked at my paintings. He began asking why I put a face here, why I used a certain color there. “I don’t know,” I said. “I have no training.” “Don’t train!” he said. “Look, I’ve trained. I couldn’t do what you do. Do it!” For me, the less thinking, the better. Just show up and do it. Come on! We’ll all be dead one day. Have a ball. Smile though your heart is breaking… have a laugh. We’ll be dead a long time.
I tell people who are struggling that it can help to find photographs of themselves as children: Go back to that child whenever you’re in doubt. Never forget the child in that photo, that little kid who knew so little and who perhaps no one believed in. It’s important to remember who you are and where you come from.
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face;