Copyright Parade
Like many of his colleagues from the United Kingdom, Anthony Hopkins remains one of the most widely respected and avidly beloved actors of his generation. A versatile performer able to seamlessly move between practically any genre imaginable, the 87-year-old actor has enjoyed an incredible career throughout his six decades in the entertainment industry. Yet even when highlighting his immense success, Hopkins has also suffered through various issues in his personal life, including a serious drinking habit that threatened to spiral out of control in the early 1970s. According to his new memoir, We Did OK, Kid, Hopkins detailed a difficult conversation he had with his doctor that helped him reconcile with his severe drinking problem. Between his alcoholism and his smoking habit, Hopkins’ doctor specifically said that his physical results seemed to resemble that of a man in his 50s or 60s, rather than someone of Hopkins’ age (the actor was 37-years-old at the time). The Oscar winner remembered his doctor’s grim warning: “You have the beginning of liver problems. Could turn into cirrhosis. Also inflammation of the pancreas, and your lungs are becoming congested. I strongly advise you to stop smoking immediately. Smoking is deadlier than alcohol. It causes stasis in the arteries and veins. Alcohol in excess is also a killer. I don’t need to tell you that. You already know. So, my friend, it’s up to you.” Hearing his doctor’s words, the Silence of the Lambs actor finally realized just how serious his issues at the time had become. “During my drinking years I had caused a lot of pain,” Hopkins writes in his book. “I never had any idea that I was an alcoholic. Rarely does a heavy drinker wake up to that without an intervention of some kind, and even then it takes a while to sink in. Denial is the greatest killer. And I was still in the grips of my addiction, though it was getting harder to deny it.” Fortunately, Hopkins was able to recover from his alcoholism by 1975, following a particularly troubling incident of drunk driving where he realized he could have injured or killed someone else on the road.
