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Many consider it the greatest introduction in movie lore – and he remains utterly motionless.

The FBI trainee, new to the job, proceeds down a row of prison cells arriving at Hannibal Lecter's secure glass tank. He is positioned, with features like a skeletal visage radiating satanic malice, eerily immobile in his form-fitting prisoner's blue outfit. He doesn't move right up until he throws himself against the glass, emitting that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. A multitude of real-crime films have since revealed that actual serial killers tend to be quite dull, far from the actor's captivating film persona.

Hopkins was hardly unrecognized at the time he got that Oscar-winning role in The Silence of the Lambs back in 1989: he was already established, but rather a megastar was cemented. His portrayal of Lecter was inspired, the actor happily remembers in this new autobiography, on Bela Lugosi's Dracula, on Stalin based on his daughter's accounts, as well as his icily exacting drama teacher Christopher Fettes. There was also a parent-child dynamic to these scenes; a sore point for Anthony, who recounts how his portrayal of Lear was indirectly affected by painful regret about Abigail, the daughter he was separated from from his disastrous first marriage during the 60s to his first wife, who resented his absences and drinking.

The book's name comes from an historical picture of Anthony as a small child playing on the sand with his father – the kid who maybe thought he couldn't make it. He was a bewildered, lonely, vulnerable little boy raised in Port Talbot, the child of Richard Hopkins, the standout secondary character in the narrative: a pastry chef and man's man, a straightforward talker who detested the Bible-punching hypocrites at the church and refused to showing his emotions, but had a streak of nostalgic, emotional sentimentality. His father who furiously resented the necessity of going humbly to affluent family members such as Aunt Patty, whose spouse was acquainted with the politician Nye Bevan and was able to secure Anthony as a boy into a prestigious academy: “Due to their immense riches!” he raves during the car ride. “We're all hoping for some pickings! Total garbage, that's all it is!”

The pleading was effective, for a while. Hopkins was a hopeless student at his new school. Then, during in an English lesson he had to recite the verse by John Masefield titled The West Wind – without seeing it first – and his voice awakened; he amazed the instructor and the other boys. He convincingly states that poetry, on its own, started his career. This, along with enrolling in the dramatic society at the YMCA. Notably, he graduated a no-hoper, pursued acting, and to the astonishment of his parents, was performing with Laurence Olivier at the famous theater in under a decade. He accomplished it mostly independently, though at that time financial aid was available for drama school – a path to success for performers from modest means. His father was always amazed with Anthony's worldwide acclaim: on asking his son to recite the Yorick speech from the play Hamlet, his father paid close attention and then retreated to another room and burst into tears.

Regarding the fiery, stubborn individual, he quit the National Theatre company out of frustration – causing Olivier's regret and criticism – but lucked into a memorable TV character as a suspected war criminal in Leon Uris's QB VII, which eventually resulted to roles such as in the film The Elephant Man and a thriving starry career in movies, which he liked more over theater. And he quit booze in 1975 after being a heavy drinker, and managed to live into his later years to deliver outstanding roles, including Lecter, the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day featuring Emma Thompson and the elderly man with dementia in the movie The Father – his second Oscar.

In the later sections of the book his personality becomes more opaque, more deliberate. A few tales doesn't quite come off. He remembers going out for lunch with his fellow actor in the film Nixon, the highly regarded performer Paul Sorvino, who wanted to tell 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 of Sorvino as driven due to resentment. Truly?

He repeatedly performs the grounded, serious thespian who maintains it's your duty to get there on time, learn everyone's name on set and proceed with the work. Indeed. 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. If you ever repeat that near me, I'll alter your appearance!” He appears to be an individual who stopped drinking but maybe not the belligerence that went with it. A Shakespearean like him surely knows the lines about Kent from Cornwall from the play Lear: “He does not know how to flatter! An honest mind and plain – he is compelled to be honest!”

He finishes his autobiography with a detailed supplement composed simply