Quick Take
- Narration: Kenneth Branagh narrates Hopkins’ memoir with a deep respect for Welsh identity and theatrical lineage, an actor reading an actor, and the fit is nearly perfect
- Themes: Alcoholism and sobriety, the unlikely path through acting, Welsh working-class inheritance
- Mood: Searching and vulnerable, with flashes of dry wit and genuine wonder
- Verdict: A rare memoir that earns the word honest, Hopkins is unflinching about the costs of the life he built, and Branagh’s narration makes it sing.
I was halfway through my morning walk when Kenneth Branagh’s voice arrived in my headphones with the opening lines of We Did OK, Kid, and I actually slowed my pace without realizing it. There is something about hearing one great actor read another’s words that creates an almost theatrical attentiveness. By the time we reached the story of the young Anthony Hopkins watching the 1948 Hamlet in a Port Talbot cinema, I had stopped walking entirely.
Sir Anthony Hopkins has spent sixty years giving audiences the impression of total self-possession, the calculating stillness of Hannibal Lecter, the patrician gravity of Stevens in The Remains of the Day, the raw collapse of King Lear. What We Did OK, Kid reveals is the man underneath those performances: a struggling student dismissed by teachers and peers alike, a Welsh boy from a steelworks town who grew up around men who drank to suppress every vulnerability, someone who came very close to destroying everything he built before finding sobriety and holding it for nearly half a century.
Port Talbot and the Men Who Shaped Silence
The memoir opens in Wales, and Hopkins spends considerable time in Port Talbot, a deliberate choice. He is not performing the working-class origin story as a credentialing device, as lesser celebrity memoirs do. He is genuinely reckoning with what those origins built in him: the emotional fortification, the difficulty with connection, the alcoholism that ran through the men of his family like a fault line. His father and grandfather emerge as figures of complex tenderness, stoic, difficult, formative, and the raw emotion Hopkins pulled from his father’s stoicism for his King Lear performance is one of the memoir’s most quietly devastating passages. The craft and the biography are inseparable here.
Reviewer Sunshine noted that Hopkins is much more complex than she expected, and that surprise feels accurate. The public version of Hopkins is a monument. The Hopkins of this memoir is someone who spent decades not quite believing he deserved to be in the same rooms as Olivier and Burton, who fought his own nature at every step, who still battles the desire to move through life alone rather than risk connection.
Olivier, Burton, and What the Stage Teaches
Hopkins handles his relationship with Laurence Olivier with a specificity that avoids both reverence and score-settling. Olivier admitted him to RADA after his Iago, and what follows is an account of working under the most exacting theatrical influence of the twentieth century, absorbing lessons about craft and discipline that Hopkins would later translate into film work with a precision that left directors occasionally unsettled. The chance meeting with Richard Burton in his art teacher’s apartment, as a young boy, and then the later backstage encounter as two established actors before a performance of Equus, is handled as the kind of biographical symmetry that life occasionally provides to make it readable.
The film career sections are rich with specific detail about how Hopkins constructed his most famous performances. The Bela Lugosi Dracula informing Lecter’s physical precision. The way he approaches a script not as literature but as architecture. Reviewer MinnieBannister wished the book were longer, and that feeling surfaces particularly in these sections, there is the sense of Hopkins just beginning to open a door on his creative process before the memoir moves on.
What Kenneth Branagh Adds
The audiobook production here is unusually thoughtful. It opens with music composed by Hopkins himself, an early signal that this is not a standard celebrity memoir read by whoever was available. Branagh’s narration is a considered casting decision, not a default one. Both men are British theatrical actors who came up through Shakespeare, who understand the texture of that particular formation, and Branagh reads Hopkins’ prose with a deep attention to its Welsh cadences and theatrical references. The memoir concludes with Hopkins himself performing a selection of his and his father’s favorite poems, and the contrast between the two voices, Branagh’s narrative distance and Hopkins’ own intimacy in those final recordings, is moving in a way that seems deliberately arranged.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
This is exceptional for anyone interested in acting, recovery memoirs, or the specific texture of the postwar British theatrical world. For listeners who love Hopkins’ film work, it offers the best available account of how that work was built and what it cost. Skip it if you want a conventional anecdote-heavy Hollywood memoir; the book is more inward-looking than that, more interested in the psychology of performance than the gossip of industry. Reviewer Lisa W found it inspiring and honest in ways she hadn’t anticipated, and that response seems like the correct register for the experience this book offers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Anthony Hopkins’ own voice appear at any point in the audiobook, or is it entirely Kenneth Branagh?
Hopkins himself reads a selection of his and his father’s favorite poems at the conclusion of the audiobook, which creates a meaningful contrast with Branagh’s narration throughout. The audiobook also opens with music Hopkins composed. So both voices are present, with Branagh handling the main memoir text.
How candidly does the memoir deal with Hopkins’ alcoholism and its impact on his family?
Very candidly. Hopkins addresses the cost of his addiction directly: his first marriage, his estrangement from his only child, and the moments that finally moved him toward sobriety. He does not minimize the damage or perform excessive contrition, the tone is honest rather than confessional in the performative sense.
Does the book cover his iconic roles like Hannibal Lecter and King Lear in sufficient depth for fans of his film work?
There is genuine insight into how Hopkins constructed specific performances, including the Lecter chapter and his King Lear. Reviewer MinnieBannister wished for more, and the book does move through some of these areas more quickly than devoted fans might want. But what is there is specific and illuminating rather than promotional.
Is the memoir primarily about Hopkins’ career or his personal life?
Both are present, but they are treated as inseparable. Hopkins’ approach is to show how the personal experience, the Welsh stoicism, the addiction, the difficulty with connection, directly informed the work. This is not a career survey with personal footnotes; it is a serious attempt to understand how the man and the actor were built from the same material.
