He admits to having spoken coldly about his daughter in public – and references a “regrettable interview” where he said that he did not know whether she was married or had children and did not care. But their estrangement remains “the saddest fact of my life and my greatest regret… that hardness is my default… I hope my daughter knows that my door is always open to her,” he concludes, vaguely. “I want her to be well and happy.”
3. Quitting Macbeth mid-production
Despite warnings that he would never work again, Hopkins couldn’t bear to continue his run as the lead in the National Theatre’s 1973 production of Macbeth. He felt that the director John Dexter was far too disrespectful:
“What made the show intolerable were the vicious snipes… [Dexter’s] jabs were not going to stop, so what was the point in sticking around?”
As word got out, his friend and mentor Laurence Oliver, the National’s founding director, called. “You’re being quite foolish. On your own head be it, dear boy.”
But his retirement proved short-lived. A few weeks later, Hopkins was offered a part in a US television adaptation of Leon Uris’s QB VII, about a doctor accused of working for the Nazis in Auschwitz. His agent told him that he was “born under a lucky star”.
4. Destructive alcoholism
The actor describes drinking as “a family tradition” – one he took to extremes. He dimly recalls a “terrible early 1970s film” of which he has no clear recollection of having acted in, though his name appears in the credits. “No one in that movie could remember a minute of doing it: we’d all been blackout drunk.”
A few years later, his drinking was out of control. Hopkins reached rock bottom in the mid-1970s when he drove “in a drunken blackout through Beverly Hills”. He writes: “I’d driven that car all night from Arizona without knowing what I was doing. I could have killed someone. I could have taken out a whole family.” Realising he’d had a lucky escape, he went teetotal.
5. An unfaithful second marriage
Hopkins credits Jennifer Lynton, to whom he was married from 1973 to 2002, with helping him overcome his alcoholism – though he had a strange way of expressing gratitude, divorcing her in 2002 after he began to feel trapped in their relationship. (He married his third wife, Stella Arroyave, a year later).
