Anthony Hopkins is known for playing characters with hidden depths—Hannibal Lecter, the butler in The Remains of the Day—men who keep most of what they feel buried beneath the surface. For a long time, that was Hopkins himself.
In his memoir and a recent interview, he describes a night that changed everything: December 29, 1975, at 11 p.m. He was drunk, in a blackout, driving his car somewhere in California, with no idea where he was going. Suddenly, he realized he could easily kill someone. He pulled over, went into a Beverly Hills party, found an ex-agent and said, “I need help.”
And then, he says, something happened. He looked at his watch—11 o’clock—and, as he tells it, a voice spoke to him from deep inside: “It’s all over. Now you can start living. And it has all been for a purpose, so don’t forget one moment of it.” He calls it “spooky”—a male, reasonable voice, like a radio in his soul. From that moment, he says, the craving to drink was taken from him.
At 87 he looks back—from a bullied, lonely boy called “Dennis the Dunce,” to a man nearly destroyed by alcohol, to an actor with a long, rich life—he hears a pattern: “Everything I sought and yearned for found me. I didn’t find it. It came to me.”
The article doesn’t say if Hopkins has accepted Christ, but he’s getting close–or maybe God is moving close to him.
