Anthony Hopkins reveals disturbing alcoholism, driving blackout drunk: ‘I could have killed someone’

One night in 1975, Anthony Hopkins drove a car all night from Arizona to Beverly Hills and had no recollection of doing so because he was blackout drunk.

When he asked his agent what had happened — and where his car was — he was told they’d found him on the side of the road, luckily before the cops did.

“I could have killed someone,” the actor, 87, writes in his memoir, “We Did Ok, Kid” (out Tuesday). “I could have taken out a whole family.”

7

On December 29, 1975, Hopkins writes that the “craving to drink” suddenly disappeared.

He stopped drinking, went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and was struck that everyone in the room had something in common.

“We were drunks,” he writes, “and we didn’t want to drink anymore.”

After he sobered up, the actor, now 87, says he heard a voice ask him if he wanted to live or die. When he replied to the former, it said, “It’s all over now. You can start living.”

The Oscar-winning “Silence of the Lambs” star recalls starting drinking at age 19 and whiskey being his “favorite meal.” It wasn’t a social thing. “I preferred drinking alone,” he writes.

7

7

As he got older, he would sometimes stop for a week or two, but never lasting more than three weeks.

“Any longer, I felt I was going mad,” he writes. “It took another twelve years for me to cut the knot and enter a new world.”

Hopkins’ personal life was colored by his drinking.

He calls his first marriage to Petronella Barker, whom he wed in 1967, “the worst two years of my life….our opposing personalities and my alcoholism doomed the relationship from the start … my depression was boundless; the booze was my pacifier.”

7

7

By the time they realized what a horrendous mistake they had made, Barker was pregnant with their daughter, Abigail.

One evening, Hopkins returned home, and the couple immediately began to quarrel.

“I had never been physically violent,” he writes, “but in that moment I was filled with such a revulsion that I became afraid for both myself and her.”

7

Hopkins packed up and left.

After he became sober, Hopkins attempted to make amends with his first wife and daughter, but the “meeting was awkward” and the damage had been done.

“Abigail never seemed able to forgive me for leaving the family when she was a baby,” he writes. “She had her reasons. I can’t blame her for that. That’s life. But it was and is a tremendous source of pain.”

In a recent interview with The New York Times, he noted they were still estranged.

“I wish her well, but I’m not going to waste blood over that. If you want to waste your life being in resentment, fine, go ahead,” he said bluntly. “Get over it.”

7

The “Thor” actor has found happiness with his third wife, Stella Arroyave, who owns a gallery. The two married in 2003.

“She broke me wide open,” he writes, “helped me overcome the old feelings of regret and anxiety in a way that’s set me free. ‘No matter what the past holds,’ she says, ‘you can recognize it and move on.'”