Sir Anthony Hopkins shares important life lessons

Sir Anthony Hopkins, though not nominated this year for his role as King Herod in Mary (Netflix), has, of course, earned copious Oscar honors, including the Best Actor Oscar for Father (2020), which he won at age 83, making him the oldest winner ever. He won the same award in 1992 for Silence of the Lambs. Then there are his Best Actor nods for The Remains of the Day (1994) and Nixon (1996), as well as Best Supporting Actor nominations for Amistad (1996) and The Two Popes (2020).

But, if there was an award for course-correcting one’s life when things are going dangerously downhill, and doing it with such good cheer, Sir Anthony would be the winner this year, hands down.

Philip Anthony Hopkins — son of Annie Muriel (née Yeates) and Richard Arthur Hopkins, a baker — was born on December 31, 1937, in Port Talbot, Wales. He grew up with no religious formation, since his parents were both atheists. His father’s working-class values kept him humble and real. Since he only immersed himself in art and music, however, his parents enrolled him in a discipline-heavy school. It didn’t work.

As Hopkins told the New York Times in 2002: "I was a poor learner, which left me open to ridicule and gave me an inferiority complex. I grew up absolutely convinced I was stupid." This off-the-charts emotionally-smart kid was, by age 16, studying theatre at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and, after completing national service in the British Army’s Royal Artillery (1958-1960), went on to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (1961-1963).

His big break came when Sir Lawrence Olivier invited him to join the Royal National Theatre in 1965 for productions that included King Lear, his favorite Shakespeare play. His career rocketed off.

Perhaps the “highlight of my life,” was The Father, in which he played a man struggling with Alzheimer’s, he told the Telluride Film Festival in August 2019 at the film’s premiere.

Not surprisingly, after all the theatrical and cinematic make-believe, liquor became a means of escape. That’s what actors “do in theatre, you drink,” he wryly noted for The Telegraph. Indeed! Just ask John Barrymore, Mary Astor, Spencer Tracy, Jack Lemmon, and Faye Dunaway—to name just a few I’ve written about. Feeling hurtful emotions deeply, many turn to alcohol to dull the pain only to find their lives spinning out of control.

Tracy, considered by his peers the best actor ever, never quite got a handle on his alcoholism, though he struggled mightily.

Sir Anthony Hopkins though did — by the grace of God.

On December 29, 1975, driving while “drunk out of my skill,” Hopkins told the BBC late last year, he got a grip and promptly checked himself into an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) program.  “It was like being possessed by a demon, an addiction, and I couldn’t stop,” he told Piers Morgan in February 2011, “And millions of people are like that. I could not stop.”

Before long a woman was asking him, “Why don’t you just trust in God?”

It struck Hopkins as an eminently reasonable question. Trusting in himself and the power of alcohol was a decidedly losing proposition. With that little question, his craving for alcohol diminished, and his faith in God increased, day by day. Quite simply, the former atheist now found he could fill himself with God.

On December 29, 2024, 49 years alcohol-free, Hopkins took to Facebook, urging others to seek help if needed. Five years earlier, after that first brutal year of COVID, he had had a similar message while offering life lessons: “Don’t give up. Just keep in there. Keep fighting. Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid. That sustained me through my life.”

Besides his acting achievements, Sir Anthony Hopkins is a prolific composer. His “Life Is A Dream” concert performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Riyadh last month, calls to mind the soul-searing symphony that Lionel Barrymore composed in honor of his late brother John, who graced the London stage as Hamlet 100 years ago, but, who was never able to conquer his addiction to alcohol. He did, however, return to the Church, as recounted in my Oasis of Faith.

It is a testament to how God takes our suffering and uses it to help us love, as poignantly articulated by Hopkins in Shadowlands (1993), in which he played C.S. Lewis. Hopkins is now imparting the same lesson in the wake of losing his Malibu home in the California fires at the start the year. As he somberly wrote in an Instagram post: “As we struggle to heal from the devastation of these fires, it’s important we remember that the only thing we take with us is the love we give.”