My drinking should have killed me, says Hopkins
ACADEMY Award-winning actor Anthony Hopkins has said that he ‘should have died early on’ after a long battle with alcoholism.
The actor, 80, said he was difficult to work with early on in his career because he was usually hungover – and credited a woman he spoke to at Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1970s with saving his life.
Hopkins, who began his career on the stage in 1960, told students at the University of California, Los Angeles, that he had been ‘disgusted, busted and not to be trusted’ while he was drinking.
‘Because that’s what you do in theatre – you drink,’ he said.
‘But I was very difficult to work with as well because I was usually hungover.’ The Welsh actor won an Oscar in 1991 for his portrayal of cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.
He told how he turned his life around following a talk with a woman from Alcoholics Anonymous in December 1975.
Hopkins said the woman asked him: ‘Why don’t you just trust in God?’, and from then on, the urge to drink was ‘never to return’. He said he got into acting ‘because [he] had nothing better to do’, adding that he was ‘not at all bright’ in school and was often bullied.
Hopkins told the students: ‘I believe that we are capable of so much. From my own life, I still cannot believe that my life is what it is because I should have died in Wales, drunk or something like that.’