Sir Anthony Hopkins: It's such a miracle being alive

2 hours ago Share Save Katie Razzall Culture and Media Editor, Los Angeles Share Save

BBC Two-time Oscar winner, Sir Anthony Hopkins tells the BBC that he can't "take credit" for his success

Not many people can say they've been given a private piano recital by Sir Anthony Hopkins. But that's exactly what happened when our four-strong BBC team went to interview the double Oscar-winning actor in Los Angeles. We were in the same room as the man who terrified as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, shattered as a butler in The Remains of The Day and devastated as a dad with dementia in The Father. An actor who was cast by Oliver Stone as President Nixon because - according to Sir Anthony - the director said "you're nuts like Nixon". At a grand piano in a hotel in Beverly Hills, as he plays us a piece he calls Goodbye, it's clear an artistic soul exudes from his every pore. Haunting notes of music, lines of poetry and Shakespearean verses cascade out of him.

A private piano recital with Sir Anthony Hopkins

We were meeting because Sir Anthony's publishing his autobiography, We Did OK, Kid, an honest and at times upsetting account of a loner who was bullied and written off as a child in Wales and became one of Britain's finest acting exports. He puts his success down to sheer luck, telling me: "I couldn't take credit for any of it, I couldn't have planned any of this - and now at 87, about to turn 88, I get up in the morning and I think, 'Hello, I'm still here,' and I still don't get it." From the outside, it looks less about luck and more about his deep understanding of human emotion, as his performances testify. I ask what makes him such an instinctive actor. "It's such a miracle being alive," he says. He finds the complexity of human beings "fascinating... I mean, how can you produce Beethoven, Bach and then Treblinka and Auschwitz?" Sir Anthony has always understood the duality of being human, and it exp