Sir Anthony Hopkins has said a drink-driving incident in an alcoholic blackout on December 27, 1975, led him to seek help for alcohol addiction, a decision he credits with 50 years of sobriety, per independent.com.
The 88-year-old Welsh actor, a two-time Oscar winner for The Silence of the Lambs and The Father, described the moment in an interview with The Observer as he prepares to release his debut album.
Hopkins said he was driving to a party in a blackout when he realised he could have killed another family. He had been given a contact number for support in New York and called it on the following Monday morning.
He said he attended a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, where an elderly woman told him: “You don’t ever have to drink again.” He said the craving for alcohol left him after that meeting and has never returned.
The actor has previously spoken openly about addiction and its impact on his early career and personal life. In his memoir We Did OK, Kid, published last year, he wrote that alcohol made him confrontational with directors and collaborators and a poor husband to his first two wives.
He also described appearing in what he called a “terrible early 1970s film” that he has no recollection of making, writing: “No one in that movie could remember a minute of doing it: we’d all been blackout drunk.”
Hopkins is now promoting his debut album, Life Is a Dream, a collection of songs written over six decades inspired by his childhood in Margam, south Wales, and the farmland and mountains surrounding his family home in the 1940s.
In a statement, Hopkins, who began acting almost 70 years ago and has won four Baftas, said music was his “first desire” and that some of the pieces had stayed with him for decades.
Considered one of the greatest living actors, Hopkins is known for roles ranging from The Remains of the Day and The Elephant Man to his portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, Hannibal in 2001 and Red Dragon in 2002.
•Featured image: Anthony Hopkins in 2019 (AFP/Getty)