Anthony Hopkins Audiobooks

We Did Ok, Kid: the boy from Port Talbot who became Hannibal Lecter

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Who is Anthony Hopkins?

Sir Anthony Hopkins has occupied British acting for six decades: two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, a knighthood, and a career running from Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre to the Marvel films.

Born in Port Talbot on the last day of 1937, he trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and then at RADA, and was picked out by Olivier himself for the National Theatre in 1965, where he played Lear, Coriolanus and Macbeth. Film work followed with The Lion in Winter and The Elephant Man, but it was Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs that made him permanently famous and brought the first of his Oscars; the second arrived almost thirty years later for The Father. Between them came The Remains of the Day, Howards End, Shadowlands, Nixon and Westworld. He paints, he composes, and he has spoken openly about the drinking that nearly ended all of it.

Anthony Hopkins in audiobooks

We Did Ok, Kid is the memoir, published in 2025: Port Talbot, the schoolroom where he was written off, Olivier, Hollywood, sobriety, and a long reckoning with the father he spent decades trying to satisfy.

The audio edition makes a decision worth knowing about in advance. It is read by Kenneth Branagh rather than by Hopkins, and Branagh’s reading is superb, unhurried and entirely free of impersonation. Hopkins does appear, reading a dozen or so of his favourite poems in that unmistakable Welsh cadence, which gives the recording the feel of a long evening in his company.

At around nine hours it is candid about addiction, marriage and estrangement, and unexpectedly funny about the film industry. Anyone drawn to actors’ memoirs, or to Wales, or simply to a great voice, should press play below.