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:
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.
“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, fantasize about a life so unlike my own that I forget where I am or what I do.”
Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai
Not that Hopkins confines himself to the administration of dread. In a wonderful grace note, he refers to Lecter as being both “remote and awake,” and he has somehow managed to conjure the same coalescence when wielding very different emotions, such as shyness or despair. Hence the butler, in “The Remains of the Day” (1993), who is reluctant even to show what book he’s reading, and the mousy husband, in “84 Charing Cross Road” (1987), who sits down to dinner with his wife. “Very nice. Very tasty,” he says of the food, and gazes at his glass of water as if it were a cup of poison. For a moment, we can’t tell whether he’s going to murder his spouse or move on to dessert. At issue here, amid the domestic peace, is not only what makes people tick but, thanks to Hopkins, whether the ticking is that of a well-wound clock or an unexploded bomb.
The wife, at the dinner table, is played by Judi Dench, and the joke is that, before long, she and Hopkins would reconvene to star in “Antony and Cleopatra,” at the National Theatre, in London. Dench, in a recent book on Shakespeare, notes how early the hero expires, leaving a lover-less queen to command the stage, and tells of Hopkins whispering to her, as she keened over him in the throes of lamentation, “While you do Act V, I’ll go and have a nice cup of tea in my dressing room.”
