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Many consider it the most memorable appearance in film history – yet the actor stays without moving a muscle.

The FBI trainee, new to the job, navigates a corridor of cells arriving at Hannibal Lecter's transparent prison. The man is present, with features like a skeletal visage radiating satanic malice, unnervingly still clad in a tight prisoner's blue outfit. He stands frozen right up until he lunges at the barrier, producing that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. A multitude of documentaries on serial killers have since shown that actual serial killers tend to be quite dull, far from Anthony Hopkins's commanding screen presence.

He was not an unknown when he landed that Oscar-winning role in The Silence of the Lambs in 1989: it wasn't his debut, but a legend emerged. His Dr. Lecter drew influence, the actor happily remembers in this new autobiography, on Bela Lugosi's Dracula, on the Soviet leader based on his daughter's accounts, and also from his strictly demanding drama teacher his instructor Fettes. There was also a paternal-filial aspect within the narrative; a difficult topic for the actor, who recounts how his Lear was subconsciously influenced by painful regret about Abigail, the estranged daughter from his disastrous first marriage back in 1966 with Petronella Barker, who resented him being away and his alcohol use.

The memoir's title is derived from an old wartime photo of Anthony as a small child playing on the sand with his father – the boy who perhaps believed he would never do OK. He felt confused, shy and fragile youth raised in Port Talbot, the child of Richard Hopkins, the standout secondary character in this story: a baker and a tough individual, a straightforward talker who detested the Bible-punching hypocrites in their community and refused to showing his emotions, yet possessed a touch of dreamy, sentimental tenderness. Richard Hopkins who furiously resented the necessity of going cap-in-hand to affluent family members including Auntie Patty, whose husband knew the politician Nye Bevan and was able to secure Anthony as a boy into a prestigious academy: “Because they're bloody rich!” he exclaims in the car on the way there. “Everyone is looking for scraps! Total garbage, that's all it is!”

The humility worked, temporarily. He was a poor student at the prestigious school. Then, during in an English lesson he needed to deliver the verse by John Masefield The West Wind – without seeing it first – and that voice came to life; he amazed the instructor and the other students. He says quite plausibly that verse, by itself, launched him. Combined with participating in the YMCA theater group. Remarkably, he left school a no-hoper, entered the acting world, and shocking his family, was acting with Laurence Olivier at the famous theater within 10 years. He accomplished it mostly independently, though at that time there were grants to go to Rada – an opportunity for working-class actors. His dad remained in awe with Anthony's worldwide acclaim: when he asked Anthony to perform the Yorick monologue from the play Hamlet, his father paid close attention and then retreated to another room and burst into tears.

As for the hot-tempered, strong-willed son, he departed the theatrical troupe in a fit of pique – causing Olivier's regret and criticism – but fortunately found an excellent television part as a suspected war criminal in the show based on Uris's work, which eventually resulted to parts like that in Lynch's The Elephant Man and a thriving starry career on screen, that he favored to the stage. And he quit booze in 1975 once a notorious drinker, and so survived through midlife to achieve remarkable acting, such as Lecter, the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day featuring Emma Thompson and the senior with memory loss in The Father – his second Academy Award.

In the latter half of the book his character seems more elusive, more deliberate. Some of the anecdotage doesn't quite come off. He remembers being taken out to lunch alongside his cast mate in the film Nixon, the esteemed thespian Sorvino, who sought to advise him his acting as Nixon wasn't effective. Was this the moment for Hopkins to learn a lesson from the famous actor from Goodfellas? Not really. Anthony appears to agree with Stone's dismissal of Sorvino as being motivated by jealousy. Truly?

He consistently acts as the tough, down-to-earth professional actor who thinks it's your duty to arrive punctually, learn everyone's name on set and get on with it. Indeed. However, he also describes facing a rude director who'd made a young extra cry: “Apologize to that girl! And acquire some decency. You ever do that again around me, I'll rearrange your face! He appears to be a person who quit alcohol but maybe not the belligerence that accompanied it. A classical performer like Hopkins must know Cornwall's lines on Kent from Lear: “He is incapable of flattery! An honest mind and plain – he always tells the truth!”

Hopkins concludes his book with a lengthy appendix composed simply