Legendary actor Anthony Hopkins has been sober for 45 years and celebrated the milestone with a video message posted on Twitter on Tuesday.
The Oscar-winning star of “Silence of the Lambs”, who was an alcoholic early in his career, shared the uplifting message that many struggle with isolation and addiction during the holidays, which were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was a difficult year, full of grief and sadness for many, many people,” he said. “But 45 years ago, I received a wake-up call. I was going to disaster. I was drinking to death. I received a message, a small thought, that said: ‘Do you want to live or die?’ I said I wanted to live. And suddenly the relief came and my life has been incredible. “
The 82-year-old British rider, who has repeatedly talked about his sobriety in interviews and other appearances, added that he still has his days off and “some doubts”. But he asked everyone struggling to endure and quoted the authors Dale Carnegie and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
“‘Today is the tomorrow you were so worried about yesterday,'” he said. “You young people: don’t give up, stay there, keep fighting. ‘Be bold, and powerful forces will come to your aid.’ This has sustained me all my life. “
The actor of “Nixon”, “Two Popes” and “Westworld” is considered an icon of the former British touring theater companies. He made his professional debut in the theater in 1960 and ended up becoming a replacement for Laurence Olivier. Hopkins entered the cinema with the 1968 film adaptation of “The Lion in the Winter,” starring alongside Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn.
In 2018, the Los Angeles transplant said it was very difficult to work with him early in his career because he was “usually hungover” and that “he should have died in Wales, drunk or something”. He described himself as “disgusted, arrested and unreliable” while drinking, according to the BBC.
A woman from Alcoholics Anonymous changed her life in 1975, he said, when she asked him, “Why don’t you just trust God?” After that, the urge to drink was “never to return”.