In 2000, as the honorary mayor of Pacific Palisades, Hopkins waved from a parade. Stella Arroyave, an antiques dealer, watched and later told a colleague that she had seen her future husband. A year later, Hopkins shopped in her store, and they reconnected when she delivered furniture. He initially retreated but soon called to ask her out. Seeing his loneliness, Stella encouraged therapy; he resisted but gradually followed her advice, shedding old anxiety and regret.

Asked to narrate for Siegfried and Roy, Hopkins met their manager, Bernie Yuman, whose showmanship included a misguided attempt at flattery. Days later, Yuman returned with Muhammad Ali and Las Vegas media figures Brian and Myra Greenspun. Yuman’s promotional savvy proved useful, and he was kind to Hopkins’s mother.

In Las Vegas with his mother and Stella, Hopkins was struck by sudden happiness and proposed. Stella, who had not planned to marry, accepted. They wed privately at their Malibu home, with friends, including Mickey Rooney, attending.

Soon after, Hopkins’s mother died at age 89 with Stella by her bedside. At his mother’s request, he was away; when he was notified, his muted reaction reflected a lifetime of repressed grief. The funeral felt suffocating. That year, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which reminded him of the terrazzo floors of his childhood.

Hopkins wrote and directed the experimental Slipstream. Though not a critical or commercial success, he stood by it and reaffirmed his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s meticulous craft, studying scenes from Psycho and Shadow of a Doubt. He played Burt Munro in The World’s Fastest Indian and, despite warnings from Stella and Bruce Willis, insisted on doing rough stunts. He later joined the Marvel universe as Odin with Chris Hemsworth under director Kenneth Branagh, noting the effects-heavy work and expressing his preference for locations rather than green screens.

Hopkins first played King Lear in 1986 at 48 and felt he had failed. In 2017, Richard Eyre cast him in a film adaptation. At 79, he believed he finally had the lived experience that the role demanded, linking Lear’s rage and isolation to his father and grandfather.

He built a backstory: Cordelia’s mother died in childbirth; Lear raised the youngest as a tomboy yet stayed emotionally remote. Aware that Goneril and Regan were calculating, he still exiled Cordelia when she refused to flatter him during the division of the kingdom. Hopkins avoided sentimentality, emphasizing Lear’s rigid blankness.

A horseshoe that the Fool used as a crown became central. Hopkins recalled his father weeping over a dead horse and keeping its shoe. While filming HBO’s Westworld, Hopkins found an old horseshoe in the props department and incorporated it into Lear.

Carrying Cordelia’s body, he thought of his father’s stifled feelings. The confession of wrongdoing hit with unusual force and stirred regret over his estrangement from his daughter, Abigail: her delight as a baby when he entered a room, the night he left, and him eventually giving up. He vowed never to have more children, later becoming a father figure to outsiders as age taught him patience.

Stella likened him to the socially awkward doctor on Doc Martin. Hopkins accepted her belief that he likely had “Asperger’s syndrome,” though he preferred calling himself a cold fish. He and Stella rescued stray cats, including one from Budapest, during The Rite, which mended the childhood loss of his cat Smoky. Stella uncovered his old drawings and urged him to paint; he now works daily, often to Greek music, moving among several canvases. He cited Emerson, Thoreau, and Henry Miller as guides to making art for its own sake.

In 2019, Stella launched the Anthony Hopkins Artists Forum and insisted that he mentor young actors, despite his protests that he had no philosophy to offer. She had long protected his working conditions, once confronting producers who kept him waiting, earning her the nickname “the Boss.”

At the forum, Hopkins urged hard work, professionalism, and self-belief. Borrowing a technique from Dorothea Brande, he wrote a line on his scripts reminding himself to proceed as if failure were impossible. He advised taking any early job, reading widely, and studying classic films to learn from the greats. He emphasized reliability: showing up on time, knowing one’s lines, and respecting crews. He recounted challenging a director who mistreated an extra and counseling a young actor on set etiquette. Warning against cynicism and entitlement, he recommended Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? as a cautionary tale.

He counseled building self-worth rather than chasing self-esteem and discussed the perils of ego, citing correspondence with Ryan Holiday, the author of Ego Is the Enemy (2016). Quoting the Stoics and other writers deepened his reflections on mortality. The students’ humility moved him to tears and dissolved lingering bitterness.

This new openness fed directly into The Father, written and directed by Florian Zeller, in which Hopkins channeled his father’s last days. He imagined a disciplined engineer clinging to control as dementia advanced. Zeller included music meaningful to Hopkins, notably an aria from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers. Hopkins created a fast-talking, combative man masking confusion, requested a military tie, and introduced a recurring weather refrain. As he worked with Olivia Colman on a shadowy Wembley set, the role felt nearly effortless.

Two years later, at 83, he became the oldest Best Actor winner for The Father. Avoiding the ceremony because of COVID and expectations that Chadwick Boseman would win, he slept in Wales until his agent called with the news. Privately, he credited the forum’s students with teaching him vulnerability and felt that he shared the award with them, settling into the elder’s role of reflective witness.

Opening with Beckett on mortality, Hopkins contrasts youth’s immediacy with old age’s clear view of death. He often dreams of his father waiting on a far hill to guide him across the Welsh moors.

In 2024, at his father’s grave in Christchurch, he felt a hand on his back and a sense of peace. He remembered being 12 on Worm’s Head when an impulse to jump struck him, and his father’s hand steadied his shoulder. Another recurring dream placed him on a dangerous battlement with no way down, capturing his inner solitude.

A former teacher, whom Stella interviewed for a documentary, recalled Hopkins as a quiet, nearly invisible boy, proficient in geography and music, who within a decade was acting alongside Laurence Olivier. Hopkins marveled at his improbable arc, as if authored by an external wit.

He played Nicholas Winton in One Life, inspired by Winton’s humility in rescuing Czechoslovakian children through the Kindertransport and by the man’s careful ambiguity about faith. Childhood newsreels of Bergen-Belsen’s liberation still haunted him. A Buddhist friend’s observation that life is one long goodbye, and Meryl Streep’s image of time blurring like a bullet train, resonated and inspired him.

Vivid early memories returned: crossing a wooden bridge at dusk, a radio voice through an open window, and Aunt Lorna leading him to bluebells in Margam Woods, a moment that felt suspended in light.

At 87, he continues working and finds age an asset, echoing Olivier’s belief in late-blooming mastery. He recalls how the terminally ill Yul Brynner earned a thunderous ovation in The King and I. He relies on mantras and remembers makeup artist Stan Winston advising him to paint instinctively rather than train formally. He tells others to connect with photographs of their childhood selves and protect that vulnerability.

He still feels like an impostor and a “highly successful failure,” only to see his kinship with his father and grandfather. Hoping that he is kinder now, he revisits A. E. Housman’s “Is My Team Ploughing,” a poem that he finds more meaningful each year. Stella arranges annual flowers for his mother’s grave, stirring distant grief. He realizes that he has been running from life, not death, and that writing this memoir has brought gratitude and freedom to prepare for what his father called the Big Secret, trusting that the past never really lets one go.