Born and raised in a small Welsh steelworks town amid war and depression, Sir Anthony Hopkins grew up around men who eschewed all forms of emotional vulnerability in favor of alcoholism and brutality. A struggling student in school, he was deemed a failure with no future ahead of him. But, on a fateful Saturday night, the disregarded Welsh boy watched the 1948 adaptation of Hamlet, sparking a passion for acting that would lead him on a path that no one could have predicted.
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.
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.
