Anthony Hopkins has just published his autobiography, as they say, “until it all worked out.” Well, as a practitioner of autobiography and a scholar of the genre, I can guarantee that there is no such thing as autobiography. Assuming a biography is a biography of the author themselves, it would only live up to that definition if it used the same resources that a real biographer uses when writing a biography of someone, right? Among other things, he spoke to at least 200 people who lived with the biographer, listened to their memories, and extracted their information. But the so-called biographer does not do that. Listen only to yourself, to your memory. This is not always reliable, as you tend to “forget” certain paragraphs.
In her review of the book in Folha, Ana Paula Souza notes that Hopkins categorizes his alcoholism in the 1970s as having reached “rock bottom.” It is strange, indeed, how he describes “the end of addiction as almost magical.” “The urge to drink went away, and he found God,” Hopkins says. That’s all it takes to rely on your own memory. A true biographer would devote chapters to what must have been Hopkins’s struggle out of the gutter.
Many movie stars were alcoholics: Buster Keaton, Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Sterling Hayden, Rita Hayworth, William Holden, Errol Flynn, John Cassavetes, Carrie Fisher, Leonard Nimoy, Robin Williams, Drew Barrymore. The British, like Hopkins, were a large legion: Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, and Oliver Reed. They all have resumes that contain very painful passages about their addictions.
None of them had the happiness of Hopkins: waking up one day, magically, “without wanting to drink” — when, in real life, the morning need to drink is intense, due to spending the last few hours sleeping. As a reward, he “found God.”
Hopkins should position her book not as an autobiography, but as a memoir—her own book and hers alone. And they are not as accurate as the memories seem.
Current link: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click on the blue letter F below.