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It stands as the greatest entrance in movie lore – and he remains utterly motionless.

The FBI trainee, new to the job, must walk the line of detention units finally encountering Hannibal Lecter's secure glass tank. He is positioned, his face resembling an animated death's head filled with sinister intent, eerily immobile clad in a tight prisoner's blue outfit. He doesn't move until the moment he throws himself toward the window, making that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. Countless real-crime films have since demonstrated that actual serial killers are usually uninteresting, with nothing resembling Anthony Hopkins's powerful on-screen charisma.

He was not a newcomer at the time he got that Oscar-winning role in the iconic film back in 1989: he was already established, but a legend emerged. His portrayal of Lecter drew influence, Hopkins notes with amusement in his recent memoir, from Lugosi's Dracula, on Joseph Stalin based on his daughter's accounts, and also from his icily exacting drama teacher Christopher Fettes. The scenes also contained a paternal-filial aspect in these moments; a sore point for Anthony, who recounts how his portrayal of Lear was unknowingly shaped by an agonised guilt concerning Abigail, his distant daughter from his disastrous first marriage back in 1966 with Petronella Barker, who resented him being away and drinking.

The book's name comes from a vintage war-era photograph of a young Hopkins on the beach with his dad – the kid who maybe thought he would never do OK. He was a bewildered, lonely, vulnerable little boy raised in Port Talbot, his father was Richard Arthur Hopkins, the standout secondary character in the narrative: a bread-maker and a tough individual, a straightforward talker who despised the Bible-punching hypocrites of the chapel and refused to showing his emotions, but also exhibited dreamy, sentimental tenderness. Richard Hopkins who furiously resented how they were forced cap-in-hand to their rich relatives including Auntie Patty, whose husband knew the politician Nye Bevan and could get the young Anthony into a prestigious academy: “Because they're bloody rich!” he exclaims in the car on the way there. “We are all expecting handouts! Bloody rubbish, that's what it is!”

The pleading was effective, for a while. He was a poor student at the prestigious school. But one day during an English class he was required to perform John Masefield's poem The West Wind – without prior preparation – and his voice awakened; he shocked the educator and his classmates. He says quite plausibly that poems, alone, launched him. This, and joining the dramatic society at the YMCA. Notably, he graduated a no-hoper, went into acting, and amazingly to his parents, was acting with Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic in under a decade. He accomplished it mostly independently, even though back then there were grants for drama school – a way up for working-class actors. Richard Hopkins was continually impressed by his son's international fame: upon requesting his son to deliver the Yorick lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hopkins Sr listened attentively and then left the room and wept openly.

As for the hot-tempered, stubborn individual, he departed the theatrical troupe out of frustration – causing Olivier's regret and displeasure – but stumbled upon a memorable TV character as a potential war criminal in Leon Uris's QB VII, which eventually resulted to parts like that in David Lynch's The Elephant Man and a thriving starry career in movies, that he favored to the stage. He gave up alcohol in 1975 once a notorious drinker, and managed to live into his later years to execute great performances, such as Lecter, the servant Stevens in The Remains of the Day with Emma Thompson and the elderly man with dementia in The Father – his second Academy Award.

In the latter half of the memoir he appears more reserved, more deliberate. A few tales fall a bit flat. He mentions having lunch alongside his cast mate in Oliver Stone's Nixon, the much-respected actor Sorvino, who intended to inform him his portrayal of Nixon wasn't working. Was this the chance for him to absorb something from the legendary star of the Goodfellas fame? Hardly. He tends to concur with the director's criticism of Sorvino as driven by jealousy. Is that so?

He consistently acts as the grounded, serious thespian who maintains it is one's responsibility to get there on time, learn everyone's name on set and get on with it. Absolutely. However, he also describes standing up to an unpleasant filmmaker who brought a background actor to tears: “Apologise to her! And acquire some decency. You ever do that again near me, I'll alter your appearance!” He appears to be a person who quit alcohol but possibly not the combativeness that accompanied it. A classical performer like Hopkins must know Cornwall's lines on Kent from Lear: “He cannot flatter, he! An honest mind and plain – he is compelled to be honest!”

Anthony ends his memoir with a detailed supplement composed simply