A page-turner ... On one level, We Did OK, Kid charts a conventional path, from obscurity in regional theater to the heights of Hollywood celebrity. Yet this story is more concerned with the inner journey than the outer one ... We are all the better for it.
Feels oddly seized with touchiness and frosted over with regret. A theatre director once said to Hopkins, 'You just have a head full of Welsh saboteurs,' and they are still at work, plotting against him, to judge by the texture of this memoir. Much of it unfolds in choppy, stop-start rhythms ... His memoir is a patchy affair, to be honest, which omits entire swaths of his achievement, yet its wayward momentum exerts a certain charm, as if Hopkins were only just in control of his reminiscences.
The problem is that We Did OK, Kid is hesitant to really discuss his film career much at all. Some of the passages about Hopkins’s personal life – his complicated and sometimes damaging relationship with his working-class father, the bullying he suffered at the hands of his peers, the breakdown of two of his marriages, his addiction to alcohol and his now-longstanding sobriety – are moving and insightful...In moments like these, the book can be wrenching ... you can’t help but feel slightly short-changed at the lack of real, tangible insights into his work. His is a career that deserves depth – and demands more than what this book delivers.
In the latter half of the book his personality becomes more opaque, more studied. Some of the anecdotage doesn’t quite come off ... Hopkins concludes his book with a lengthy appendix composed simply of his favourite poems: an outrageous indulgence, perhaps, and yet it is the transcendental power of these works, and the discipline of learning them by heart, to which he owes his success.
Like some of his most memorable characters: quiet and restrained but with some darker stuff going on underneath ... There’s minimal name-dropping and only sporadic celebrity gossip but significant honesty and thoughtful reminiscence, resulting in a rich, satisfying read.
