The road trip from Arizona that saved Anthony Hopkins’ life: “You can start living”
Most of the young actors who met Laurence Olivier struggled to make a good impression.
The Shakespeare specialist famously told Dustin Hoffman to “just try acting” when the younger star gave up sleeping in order to get into character for Marathon Man, and one shudders to think what withering advice he had for actors of a lower calibre. One youthful co-star who did make a good impression on him, though, was Anthony Hopkins.
Shortly after they met in 1965, the young Welsh actor became Olivier’s protégé, kicking off an illustrious career in the theatre. Eventually, of course, Hopkins followed in his mentor’s footsteps by taking on Hollywood and arguably had an even greater impact on cinema. You never know what is happening behind the scenes in the life of a famous actor, though, even when Oscar nominations and interviews would lead towards a certain conclusion, and for Hopkins, things were pretty rough.
On the outside, things were going better than he could have imagined. In 1968, he starred opposite Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole in The Lion in Winter and more than held his own. A Hollywood movie with box office stalwart Goldie Hawn followed (an experience he despised). But just off screen, Hopkins was on a downward spiral with alcoholism.
The actor hit rock bottom in 1975 when he found himself driving, blind drunk, through the streets of Beverly Hills. Unbeknownst to him at the time, he had actually driven about 500 kilometres from Arizona that night, and only found this out when he woke up at home the next morning and discovered that his car was gone.
Panicked, he called his agent and reported the theft (in Hollywood, you always call the agent first and let them fix it without police involvement). His agent informed him that they had found him the night before, passed out behind the wheel, and that if it hadn’t been for them, the actor would be in jail at that very moment. This is arguably what should have happened, but the agent was excellent at their job and managed to pre-empt justice.
That stunning revelation was the end of the road for Hopkins. In his memoir, We Did Ok, Kid, he remembers looking up at the eucalyptus trees and thanking God that he hadn’t killed someone on that drive. He thought of his parents back in Wales and what it would be like for them to receive news that he had either killed someone or killed himself, and he decided that he needed to get busy changing his ways.
He remembers hearing a voice in his head that asked, “Do you want to live or do you want to die?” And he wisely responded, “I want to live.” Like magic or divine intervention or half-drunk hallucination, he heard yet another voice say, “You can start living.”
It was the end of 1975, and he became sober from that moment on. He moved back to the UK, which may or may not have helped in his journey with sobriety, and continued working on stage and screen until his portrayal of serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 sent his career in a whole new direction.
