We Did OK, Kid

Hopkins's memoir moves from a difficult Welsh childhood and RADA through his years under Olivier at the National Theatre, alcoholism and sobriety in 1975, and on to his Oscar-winning late-career turns, but reviewers were most taken by its refusal to soften the uglier stretches, his own accounts of infidelity and failures as a father go unvarnished. That candor is also what divided critics: some found it genuinely moving precisely because it doesn't perform contrition, while at least one prominent reviewer felt the book comes across as guarded in places and conspicuously skips over major stretches of his filmography. The result is a memoir that's stronger as a psychological self-portrait of an anxious, self-destructive young actor than as a survey of a monumental career.