Anthony Hopkins to BBC: It's a miracle to be alive

Few people can boast that actor Sir Anthony Hopkins gave them a private piano concert.

That's exactly what a four-member BBC team experienced when they went to interview the two-time Oscar winner in Los Angeles.

We were in the same room with a man who was creepy. Hannibal Lecter in the movie "The Silence of the Lambs", a butler in "The Remains of the Day" and broken as a father with dementia in the film of the same name.

The actor who was hired by director Oliver Stone to play President Richard Nixon because he was "as crazy as Nixon."

As he plays us a piece he calls "Farewell" on a grand piano in a Beverly Hills hotel, it's clear that his artistic soul radiates from every pore.

Musical notes and Shakespearean verses come from it.

The reason for the interview with the celebrated actor is his recently published autobiography "Mali, udili smo dobran poša" (We Did OK, Kid).

It is an honest and at times disturbing portrayal of a loner, who was bullied and rejected while growing up in Wales, and who later became one of Britain's finest actors.

He attributes success to pure luck.

"I can't take credit for any of it. I didn't plan anything."

"Now at 87, and about to turn 88, I wake up in the morning and think, 'Hello, I'm still here.' I still don't understand how," the actor says.

From the outside, it seems less like luck, and more like he succeeded because of a deep understanding of human emotions, which is confirmed by his performances.

What makes him such an instinctive actor?

"It's a miracle to be alive," he replies quickly.

The complexity of human beings is "fascinating," he adds.

"I mean, how can you play Beethoven, Bach, and then make Treblinka and Auschwitz," he replies with a rhetorical question.

Sir Anthony has always understood that human beings have two faces, which explains his acting range.

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He got his first opportunity to act on the big screen when actor Peter O'Toole suggested he audition for the 1968 film "The Lion in Winter."

In it, O'Toole played Henry II.

Hopkins had been a member of Sir Laurence Olivier's National Theatre Company for several years at that point.

“I couldn't fit into the British theatrical style.

"I didn't want to stand on stage and hold a spear for the rest of my life in wrinkled tights - I wanted to have a little life," he recalls in an interview.

He got the role of Richard the Lionheart and couldn't believe that he, the son of a baker from Port Talbot, was working with Katharine Hepburn.

It was Hepburn, who played his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, who gave him the "best advice" while they were rehearsing their first scene together.

"'Just say the lines. Don't act, just do it,'" advice he never forgets.

Hepburn was right, of course.

Some trained stage actors, especially at the time, did not appreciate how much they needed to adapt their performance to the intimacy of the camera, but Hopkins did.

He doesn't like to talk much about the acting profession, nor how much he is respected, but he did share how he does it.

"Be calm, economical, don't flaunt or 'brag' about your acting."

"Simplify, simplify, simplify," he says.

His roles stand out because Hopkins is characterized by emotional and psychological breadth.

He played Doctor Trives, John Hurt's friend and protector, in the film "The Elephant Man."

And then Hannibal Lecter, one of the most famous characters and villains in the history of cinema.

Instead of playing Lecter as an obviously monstrous man, "you make a U-turn and retreat," he explains.

As soon as he read a few pages of the script, he realized that the role would be "life-changing."

In his memoirs, he writes that he "instinctively felt how to play Hannibal."

"I have the devil inside me. We all have the devil inside me, I know what scares people," the actor says.

He played the Lector calmly. And 'murderously'.

So when he was in a role opposite other actors, he decided, "Don't take your eyes off that person. It's scary."

He puts on Lecter's steely smile and seems to enjoy repeating the words his character says to Clarissa, played by Jodie Foster.

"You're not a real FBI agent," he almost hisses.

"That's terrible," he says.

He is right.

Even in a luxury hotel in Los Angeles on a warm fall afternoon, I'm cold.

There is also the famous line: "I ate his liver with some broad beans and good wine."

He says that as a child he saw Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi do the same thing while playing. Dracula in the 1931 film.

Hopkins decided to copy it at the time of filming, and the director of "The Silence of the Lambs", Jonathan Demme, decided to keep it.

What's striking about the memoir is the gap between how the world viewed the young actor and how much he clearly missed it.

At school, other children bullied him, making fun of his large, "elephant" head.

The teachers slapped him and considered him a complete fool.

Even his parents more or less wrote him off.

He believes it was his creation.

“It gave me a core of anger, resentment and revenge,” he says.

But why didn't everyone notice his talents?

He was a child who received a 10-volume Children's Encyclopedia when he was six ("I was so engrossed that I read every one of them") and became fascinated with astronomy.

He was a boy who played the piano, created art, and loved Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare, quoting them often.

A school report card from 1955, when he was 17, marked a "turning point" in his life.

It was terrible, as usual.

“What will become of you?” Hopkins remembers his father lamenting.

"I said, 'One day I'll show you all.'"

He is lucky, he says, that his parents lived long enough to witness his success.

When he won his first Oscar for best actor, for The Silence of the Lambs in 1992, 11 years after his father's death, he called his mother in Wales and said, "I guess I've done well (in life)."

But it was difficult at first.

He was an alcoholic who argued with directors and others.

He wasn't always a good husband to his first two wives.

The alcohol made him nasty.

"That's the ugly side of alcoholism," he writes.

"He brought out the brutal side of me. I'm not proud of that at all."

He believes the anger came "from within."

"From my own insecurities, bullying at school and everything else. I didn't like authority."

One night in Los Angeles, in December 1975, 50 years ago, he was driving a car while in a "complete alcoholic blackout."

When he regained consciousness, he realized he was "out of control" and could have killed someone.

He called on the phone to ask for help.

"Suddenly, something said 'it's all over, now you can start living'... the desire disappeared and never came back."

At his first Alcoholics Anonymous session, he understood everyone else in the room.

"They're all misfits like me. Like all of us."

"We feel like we don't belong anywhere. We feel self-hatred. We're all the same. I'm not alone."

It is this sense of disconnection that radiates from the book.

He writes that his wife Stella believes he is on the autism spectrum, which is "probably true, given my tendency toward memorization and repetition... and my lack of emotionality."

But he adds that he prefers the term "cold fish."

"I want to know why."

It seems to have started as a reaction to being bullied and yelled at in school and military service.

“I would just watch them, and it would drive them crazy,” he remembers.

"You withdraw into yourself and think, 'Okay, you can't hurt me, right?'"

It was, he says, his "only defense... and that's power, you see: I don't care."

Of course, Anthony did care and we chatted a little about the state of the world.

It is at this point in the interview that he becomes most passionate.

He grew up in Port Talbot surrounded by people who were affected, even brutalized, by the war.

He played Nicholas Winton, a man who saved hundreds of mostly Jewish children from the Nazis, in the film One life (One Life).

Asked if he is concerned about the increasing polarization now, Hopkins says that "the world has always been a place of complete turmoil."

"But I think if we continue down this path of hatred...we're dead."

"No one is allowed to have an opinion. No one can have a different view. That's fascism. And that's madness."

"Come on, stop this nonsense, killing each other over ideas. They're just ideas... we'll all be dead one day," the actor says.

Anthony Hopkins' best roles

Looking back on his long life, I ask him what he regrets most.

"The people I've hurt over the years, the stupid things I've done," he replies quickly.

He was estranged from his only child, his daughter Abigail, whom he left when she was just a year old, and he was in the depths of alcoholism.

"When I realized I wasn't capable of being a father to Abigail, I swore I wouldn't have any more children."

“I couldn’t do to another child what I did to her,” he writes.

When he took on the role of King Lear in the 2018 Richard Eyre film in the 1980s, Lear's words to his daughter Cordelia struck a chord in his heart.

"The word that hit me harder than any other I've ever spoken was 'I did her harm.'"

"Speaking those words, I deeply felt, perhaps for the first time in my life, how much I had hurt my own daughter."

"I remembered how she lit up like a baby when I entered the room."

"I remembered saying goodbye to her the night I left."

"I remembered how I tried and failed to win her back later."

"I remembered how I gave up.

"Like Lear, but also like me, I began to cry", he writes in the book.

He didn't want to talk about it in our interview.

"I hope my daughter knows that my door is always open to her," she writes movingly in this part of the book.

I couldn't help but feel moved reading this.

It's as if he's trying to send her a message, believing, against all hope, that they can reconcile before it's too late.

At the age of 87, he returns the film, aware that he has lived much longer than he has left to live.

"Most of my friends are dead, they're gone, God bless them," he says.

"I hope I live a little longer. But even then, I think, 'Oh well, I had a good time.'"

He still seems to be having fun.

After some initial reservations when we first met, he quickly relaxed.

While playing the piano, he shared how he lost two beloved instruments in a house that burned down in the Los Angeles fires earlier this year.

"Everything was left in ruins."

As we walked together through the hotel lobby, guests noticed him and waved warmly.

"I like to say hello because people think actors are special. We're not at all," he smiles.

It was special to spend a few hours in his presence.

He is an acting legend who has given us six decades of unforgettable performances.

He is a true 'heavyweight', steeped not only in musical knowledge, but also in culture, history, and philosophy.

We end the interview on a philosophical note - as he recites "Ain't No Longer Days of Wine and Roses" from Ernest Dawson's poem and reflects on the transience of life.

"What are we doing here, what are we?" he asks.

"We can't explain anything about ourselves."

“We may have noble, religious, philosophical and scientific ideas...what is it all about?

"In the end we are nothing, and yet we are everything."

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