How Hopkins found peace

It took Anthony Hopkins a long time to find contentment. As a young man, he was angry, but after a long battle with booze, he settled down, and developed a reputation as one of Britain’s finest screen actors. “And everything in life seemed fine,” he told Mick Brown in The Daily Telegraph. “But I was restless. I went back to the theatre, and I wasn’t happy there – I wasn’t happy at all.” Then, out of the blue, in 1994, Oliver Stone asked him if he’d play Richard Nixon. Hopkins thought it was absurd – they needed an American actor – but he agreed to meet Stone for breakfast. “I was on my way across Hyde Park to the hotel and I stopped, I remember – a wet Monday morning – and I thought, well I can live here for the rest of my life and play nice, respectable parts, a nice career: the BBC and theatre, do a bit of Uncle Vanya. I thought, ‘Oh God, do I want that?’ An inner voice said, ‘No, you want an adventure.’” So he went back to California – and has never left. He now lives in Malibu with his third wife, Stella Arroyave. She has transformed his life. “She’s Latin, and she’s boom, boom, boom. And I can’t keep up with her, and it’s wonderful. And my friends are her friends, these Latin women... And I think, how extraordinary, these women, because they’re so voluble and alive. They’re the ocean, and me, I’m just a bit of stick in the mud. But I love that about my life.” At 81, he is still acting; he also reads poetry, paints, plays the piano and sings. He quotes a line from Leonard Cohen’s song

Here It Is: “‘May everyone live, and may everyone die. Hello, my love, and my love, goodbye.’ That sums it all up for me. There’s such peace in that. That’s it. All it is.”