Angela Mollard: How Hopkins memoir’s healing message was ‘ruined’ by actor’s curt remarks
Sir Anthony Hopkins’ new memoir reveals tender regrets about abandoning his only child, but his recent interviews tell a very different story, writes Angela Mollard.
For decades I’ve sought him out. Watched all his films, thrilled at his range, argued with friends over which is his best performance. No one can forget his spellbinding Oscar-winning Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs or his open-hearted optimism in The World’s Fastest Indian. But for me it was always the profound interiority of films such as The Remains of the Day and Shadowlands that captured his genius.
More than any other actor, Sir Anthony Hopkins is the master of cinematic subtlety. The economy of his expression, the imperceptible shifts in posture, the emotional awakening in his portrayal of the writer C. S. Lewis as love dismantles the tidy structures of his world.
It’s all been brilliant and beautiful, and the most enormous privilege to consume this 87-year-old man’s art, which is why I dived into his new memoir the second it was published. We Did OK, Kid promised insights into a man whose depth and versatility suggested supreme emotional intelligence.
And that’s where I came unstuck. I’d had no idea that Hopkins had abandoned his only child, Abigail, when she was a baby. At the time he was a drunk and volatile. Walking out on his first wife and their infant daughter is, he says, “the saddest fact” of his life and his “greatest regret”. But he says it would have been much worse for everyone if he’d stayed.
But for a brief period of connection, Hopkins is estranged from Abigail. She is 57 and recently battled bowel cancer.
Mortality – his and hers – must’ve been uppermost in his mind when he recounted his feelings for her. How he’d marvelled at what a “lovely creature” she was and how everyone remarked on how much she looked like him. The chapter is a tender love letter to this lost daughter, as careful and crafted as his screenwork.
How I wish he’d left it there.
You see Hopkins is likely on the autism spectrum. His third wife, Stella, believes he lives with Asperger’s syndrome and he has admitted he is obsessed with numbers and detail and having “everything in order”. Yet the actor hasn’t been formally diagnosed because nobody was back then.
For all of us who’ve grown up with an undiagnosed yet clearly neurodivergent parent, Hopkins’ memoir was an opportunity to understand our childhoods. To gain greater insight into the peculiarly talented fathers who could recall train timetables and football scores but couldn’t say “I love you” or remember our friend’s names or that we didn’t like custard. The parents who were physically present but emotionally unknowable because their minds operated awkwardly, differently, and sometimes, as a kid, that was embarrassing.
Now we know it and talk about it but back then we carried our confusion and hurt silently because there was no explanation for why our parent was blunt or disinterested, or so much more animated about a hobby or a niche interest than they ever were about us.
Hopkins’ memoir, for instance, written in the percussive tone common among some who are neurodivergent, contains a lengthy appendix of all his favourite poems.
Hopkins has been on the interview trail publicising his memoir for the past couple of weeks and I wish he’d refused to answer questions about his daughter. Because while the memoir is considered, thoughtfully edited and a potential bridge to his only child, Hopkins in real life is clumsy and curt.
In one interview he blunders in, suggesting Abigail needs to “get over” her problems with him. Stella has invited his daughter to visit, he states, not explaining why he personally couldn’t have reached out.
“If you want to waste your life being in resentment – 50 years later, 58 years later – fine, go ahead,” he says defiantly. He said he didn’t care if his daughter read his memoir and that we are all saints and sinners.
“Life is painful,” he says. “Sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes we get hurt. But you can’t live like that. You have to say, ‘Get over it’ … I did what I could, so that’s it.”
Elsewhere he dismisses as “nonsense” his wife’s suggestion he might live with Asperger’s. “It’s all rubbish. ADHD, OCD, Asperger’s, blah, blah, blah, blah,” he tells The Sunday Times. “All these labels. I mean who cares?”
It would be easy to cancel Hopkins. To dismiss him as a dinosaur. To stop watching his films because, while magnificently talented, he has no idea and no curiosity about what it’s like to have a father like him.
I’m the same age as Abigail and feel sorry for her. Her father’s memoir offered understanding and healing. Now he’s ruined it. I bet they’ll never reconcile.
But I know this: I will continue to revel in Hopkins’ films and I will appreciate the complex, uncomfortable man he is because I taught myself a long time ago that a neurodivergent parent is sometimes incapable of providing what a daughter yearns for.
Those quirky unreachable minds where thoughts move on rails and language is literal have a different architecture. Understanding that brings peace.
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Originally published as Angela Mollard: How Hopkins memoir’s healing message was ‘ruined’ by actor’s curt remarks
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