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It stands as the most memorable appearance in film history – and he remains without moving a muscle.

The FBI trainee, just starting out, navigates the line of detention units finally encountering the notorious doctor's secure glass tank. There he stands, with features like a living skull filled with sinister intent, unnervingly still clad in a tight prisoner's blue outfit. He remains motionless until the moment he throws himself toward the window, making that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. A multitude of real-crime films have since revealed that genuine criminals are often very boring, lacking anything like the actor's powerful on-screen charisma.

Hopkins was hardly an unknown at the time he got his Academy Award-winning part in the 1991 thriller back in 1989: a star wasn't born, but a legend was forged. His Dr. Lecter was based, Hopkins cheerfully recalls in this new autobiography, on the classic Dracula, on Joseph Stalin based on his daughter's accounts, as well as his rigorously precise acting coach his instructor Fettes. The scenes also contained a paternal-filial aspect to these scenes; a difficult topic for Anthony, who further explains how his Lear was unknowingly shaped by an agonised guilt regarding his daughter Abigail, his distant daughter from his initial marriage back in 1966 to his first wife, who was angered by him being away and his drinking habits.

The book's name comes from a vintage war-era photograph of Anthony as a small child on the beach with his dad – the kid who maybe thought he would never do OK. He appeared lost, shy and fragile youth hailing from Port Talbot, the child of Richard Hopkins, the memorable figure in the narrative: a baker and a traditional male, a straightforward talker who loathed the religious hypocrites in their community and avoided displaying emotion, but also exhibited nostalgic, emotional sentimentality. Richard Hopkins who furiously resented the way they had to go cap-in-hand to their rich relatives such as Aunt 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 shouts during the car ride. “We are all expecting handouts! Absolute nonsense, that's the truth!”

The pleading was effective, temporarily. Anthony struggled academically at his new school. Then, during during an English class he was required to perform the verse by John Masefield titled The West Wind – without seeing it first – and his talent emerged; he shocked the educator and the other students. He convincingly states that verse, by itself, propelled him forward. Combined with participating in the YMCA drama club. Notably, he graduated without much hope, pursued acting, and to the astonishment of his parents, was acting alongside Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic within 10 years. He largely achieved it alone, although in those days scholarships existed to go to Rada – a way up for working-class actors. 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 began crying.

As for the hot-tempered, stubborn individual, he left the National Theatre in a moment of anger – causing Olivier's regret and displeasure – but lucked into a memorable TV character as a suspected war criminal in Leon Uris's QB VII, which eventually resulted to parts like that in the film The Elephant Man and a luminous film journey in movies, that he favored over theater. He stopped drinking back in 1975 once a notorious drinker, and managed to live into middle age to deliver outstanding roles, such as Lecter, the butler Stevens in the film The Remains of the Day featuring Emma Thompson and the senior with memory loss in The Father – his second Academy Award.

During the second part of the book his personality becomes more opaque, more deliberate. Certain stories doesn't quite come off. He recalls being taken out to lunch by his co-star in Oliver Stone's Nixon, the highly regarded performer Sorvino, who intended to inform him his acting as Nixon wasn't effective. Was this the moment for him to absorb something from the legendary star of the Goodfellas fame? Not really. Anthony appears to agree with Stone's rejection of Sorvino as driven by jealousy. Is that so?

He repeatedly performs the tough, down-to-earth professional actor who maintains it is one's responsibility to get there on time, learn everyone's name on set and get on with it. Quite so. But he also recounts facing a rude director who'd made a young extra cry: “Say sorry to her! And learn some manners. You ever do that again in front of me, I'll change the shape of your face! Anthony comes across as someone who gave up drink yet perhaps not the aggression that went with it. A classical performer like Hopkins surely knows the lines about Kent from Cornwall from the play Lear: “He cannot flatter, he! A truthful and simple spirit – he must speak truth!”

Anthony ends his memoir with a detailed supplement composed simply