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Many consider it the most iconic introduction in film history – yet the actor stays utterly motionless.

The FBI trainee, just starting out, navigates a corridor of cells finally encountering the notorious doctor's reinforced glass enclosure. He is positioned, his face resembling a skeletal visage filled with sinister intent, unnervingly still clad in a tight prisoner's blue outfit. He stands frozen until the moment he propels himself against the glass, producing that unforgettable spitting-growling noise. Numerous real-crime films have since demonstrated that actual serial killers are usually uninteresting, far from the actor's commanding screen presence.

Hopkins was hardly unrecognized when he landed his Academy Award-winning part in the iconic film in 1989: a star wasn't born, instead, a superstar emerged. His Dr. Lecter was inspired, Hopkins cheerfully recalls in his latest book, on Bela Lugosi's Dracula, on the Soviet leader as recalled by his daughter, and also from his rigorously precise Rada tutor Christopher Fettes. The scenes also contained a father-daughter dimension in these moments; a painful subject for Hopkins, who also describes how his King Lear was indirectly affected by painful regret about Abigail, his distant daughter from his disastrous first marriage during the 60s to Petronella Barker, who disliked his time away and drinking.

The book's name comes from an old wartime photo of Anthony as a small child playing on the sand with his father – the child who might have felt he couldn't make it. He was a bewildered, lonely, vulnerable little boy raised in Port Talbot, his father was Richard Arthur Hopkins, the memorable figure in the narrative: a pastry chef and a traditional male, a plain speaker who loathed the sanctimonious churchgoers at the church and refused to expressing his feelings, yet possessed a touch of nostalgic, emotional sentimentality. His father who deeply disliked the necessity of going humbly to affluent family members like Auntie Patty, who was connected to the politician Nye Bevan and helped enroll Anthony as a boy into an elite school: “Because they're bloody rich!” he exclaims while traveling there. “We are all expecting handouts! Bloody rubbish, that's what it is!”

The grovelling paid off, for a while. Anthony struggled academically at the prestigious school. However, one day in a literature class he was required to perform John Masefield's poem The West Wind – sight unseen – and that voice came to life; he stunned the teacher and his classmates. He says quite plausibly that verse, by itself, propelled him forward. Combined with participating in the YMCA drama club. Notably, he graduated without much hope, went into acting, and shocking his family, was on stage with the great Olivier at the Old Vic in under a decade. He accomplished it mostly independently, although in those days financial aid was available for drama school – a way up for actors from humble backgrounds. Richard Hopkins was continually impressed of Anthony's global success: on asking his son to deliver the Yorick lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet, his father paid close attention and then retreated to another room and wept openly.

Regarding the fiery, bloody-minded son, he departed the theatrical troupe in a moment of anger – to Olivier's profound dismay and displeasure – but fortunately found a great TV role as a suspected war criminal in Leon Uris's QB VII, which led indirectly to roles such as in Lynch's The Elephant Man and a luminous film journey on screen, that he favored to the stage. He stopped drinking back in 1975 after being a heavy drinker, and thus made it into his later years to execute great performances, including Lecter, the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day with Emma Thompson and the senior with memory loss in his film The Father – his second Academy Award.

In the latter half of his autobiography he appears more reserved, more deliberate. Some of the anecdotage fall a bit flat. He remembers going out for lunch alongside his cast mate in Oliver Stone's Nixon, the esteemed thespian Sorvino, who intended to inform him his acting as Nixon was falling short. Was this the opportunity for him to absorb something from the legendary star of the Goodfellas fame? Not really. He tends to concur with the director's criticism that Sorvino was acting due to resentment. Is that so?

He repeatedly performs the no-nonsense, practical performer who maintains it's your duty to arrive punctually, learn everyone's name on set and do the job. Indeed. Yet he also tells facing a rude director who'd made a young extra cry: “Apologize to that girl! And learn some manners. You ever do that again around me, I'll rearrange your face! Hopkins sounds like someone who gave up drink but possibly not the combativeness that went with it. A Shakespearean like him surely knows the lines about Kent from Cornwall in King Lear: “He cannot flatter, he! A truthful and simple spirit – he must speak truth!”

Hopkins concludes his book with an extensive addendum composed simply