One night in 1975, Anthony Hopkins drove all night from Arizona to Beverly Hills, but he was too drunk to remember it.
When he asked the deputy what happened and where his car was, he was told that luckily they found him on the side of the road before police did.
“I could have killed someone,” the 87-year-old actor writes in his memoir “We Did Ok, Kid,” released Tuesday. “We could have taken the whole family out.”
On December 29, 1975, Hopkins wrote that his “desire to drink” suddenly disappeared.
He quit drinking, attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and was struck by how everyone there had something in common.
“We were so drunk that we didn’t want to drink anymore,” he wrote.
The actor, now 87, said that after he sobered up, he heard a voice asking him if he wanted to live or die. When I replied to the former, he replied, “It’s all over now. You can start living.”
The Oscar-winning Silence of the Lambs star started drinking at 19 and recalls whiskey being her “favorite food”. It wasn’t a social thing. “I liked drinking alone,” he writes.
As he grew older, there were occasional breaks for a week or two, but never for more than three weeks.
“I was going crazy,” he wrote. “It took another 12 years for me to cut ties and enter a new world.”
Hopkins’ personal life was colored by drinking.
He describes his first marriage to Petronella Barker, whom he married in 1967, as “the worst two years of my life…Our conflicting personalities and my alcoholism doomed the relationship from the beginning…My depression was endless and alcohol was my pacifier.”
By the time they realized the terrible mistake they had made, Ms Barker was pregnant with their daughter Abigail.
When Hopkins returned home one evening, the couple immediately began arguing.
“I had never been physically violent, but in that moment I was filled with so much disgust and fear for both myself and her,” he wrote.
Hopkins packed up and left.
After sobering up, Mr. Hopkins tried to make amends with his first wife and daughter, but the “awkward meeting” was damaging.
“Abigail never seemed to be able to forgive me for leaving her family when she was a baby,” he wrote. “She had her reasons. You can’t blame her for that. That’s life. But it was and is a source of tremendous pain.”
In a recent interview with The New York Times, he stated that they are still estranged.
“I wish her well, but I’m not going to waste my blood on something like that. If you want to waste your life holding a grudge, fine, go ahead,” he said frankly. “Please get over it.”
The “Thor” actor found happiness with his third wife Stella Arroyave, who owns a gallery. The two married in 2003.
“She broke me down in a big way,” he writes, “helping me overcome old feelings of regret and insecurity in a way that set me free. ‘No matter what happened in the past, I can recognize it and move on,'” she says.
