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It stands as the most memorable introduction in film history – while he stands utterly motionless.

The FBI trainee, just starting out, navigates a corridor of cells finally encountering Hannibal Lecter's reinforced glass enclosure. He is positioned, with features like an animated death's head exuding demonic evil, eerily immobile wearing a snug blue inmate uniform. He stands frozen until the moment he throws himself at the barrier, producing that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. A multitude of documentaries on serial killers have since revealed that real-life murderers tend to be quite dull, lacking anything like the actor's powerful on-screen charisma.

He was not an unknown upon receiving his Academy Award-winning part in the 1991 thriller during the late 80s: a star wasn't born, but a legend was forged. His portrayal of Lecter was inspired, the actor happily remembers in his recent memoir, on Bela Lugosi's Dracula, on Stalin based on his daughter's accounts, and also from his rigorously precise drama teacher his mentor Fettes. The scenes also contained a parent-child dynamic to these scenes; a painful subject for the actor, who also describes how his Lear was unknowingly shaped by painful regret about Abigail, his distant daughter from his failed first union in 1966 to his first wife, who resented his time away and his drinking habits.

The book's name comes from an old wartime photo of a young Hopkins on the beach with his dad – the boy who perhaps believed he wouldn't succeed. He was a bewildered, shy and fragile youth from Port Talbot, son of Richard Arthur Hopkins, the scene-stealing supporting player in the narrative: a bread-maker and a traditional male, a straightforward talker who loathed the Bible-punching hypocrites of the chapel and refused to expressing his feelings, but also exhibited dreamy, sentimental tenderness. It was Hopkins Sr who deeply disliked how they were forced cap-in-hand to affluent family members like Auntie Patty, who was connected to the famous Bevan and could get the young Anthony into an elite school: “Because they're bloody rich!” he shouts in the car on the way there. “Everyone is looking for scraps! Total garbage, that's all it is!”

The pleading was effective, temporarily. He was a poor student at the prestigious school. But one day in a literature class he needed to deliver the poem by Masefield known as The West Wind – without prior preparation – and his talent emerged; he shocked the educator and his classmates. He reasonably claims that poems, alone, launched him. Combined with participating in the dramatic society at the YMCA. Surprisingly, he exited school a no-hoper, pursued acting, and shocking his family, was acting alongside Laurence Olivier at the famous theater in just ten years. He largely achieved it alone, even though back then there were grants for drama school – a way up for performers from modest means. Richard Hopkins was continually impressed of Anthony's global success: upon requesting his son to perform the Yorick monologue from the play Hamlet, Hopkins Sr listened attentively and then went into another room and wept openly.

Concerning the volatile, bloody-minded son, he quit the National Theatre company in a fit of pique – much to Olivier's disappointment and disapproval – but stumbled upon a memorable TV character as a suspected war criminal in the series QB VII, which led indirectly to roles such as in the film The Elephant Man and a thriving starry career in cinema, which he preferred to the stage. He stopped drinking back in 1975 once a notorious drinker, and managed to live into middle age to deliver outstanding roles, such as Lecter, the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day with Emma Thompson and the senior with memory loss in the movie The Father – his next Oscar win.

In the latter half of the memoir his character seems more elusive, more calculated. A few tales aren't entirely successful. He remembers going out for lunch alongside his cast mate in Oliver Stone's Nixon, the highly regarded performer Paul Sorvino, who sought to advise him his acting as Nixon was falling short. Was this the chance for Hopkins to learn a lesson from the famous actor of Scorsese's Goodfellas? Hardly. He tends to concur with Stone's dismissal that Sorvino was acting by jealousy. Is that so?

He repeatedly performs the grounded, serious thespian who maintains it's your duty to be on time, learn everyone's name on set and proceed with the work. Absolutely. Yet he also tells standing up to an unpleasant filmmaker who brought a background actor to tears: “Say sorry to her! And acquire some decency. Should you ever act that way around me, I'll rearrange your face! Anthony comes across as someone who gave up drink but maybe not the belligerence that went with it. A classical performer like Hopkins surely knows Cornwall's speech regarding Kent from the play Lear: “He is incapable of flattery! An honest mind and plain – he must speak truth!”

He finishes his autobiography with an extensive addendum composed simply