Renowned as one of Britain’s most distinguished actors, Anthony Hopkins seemed poised to revel in his storied career when he announced he would be penning his memoir.

His illustrious journey includes Oscar-winning performances that have amassed him a fortune of $160 million, camaraderie with cinematic legends, and a highly publicized battle with alcoholism that turned him into a symbol of hope for anti-addiction advocates.

However, Hopkins’s autobiography, titled ‘We Did Ok, Kid,’ which the Daily Mail has acquired ahead of its November 4 release, defies expectations of a triumphant narrative. Instead, it reveals the profoundly somber reflections of an 87-year-old man grappling with intense self-loathing, drawing unsettling parallels to one of his most infamous roles: the deeply disturbed serial killer Hannibal Lecter.

Hopkins candidly writes about his instinctive portrayal of Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs, stating, ‘I have the devil in me. We all have the devil in us. I know what scares people.’

The memoir, dedicated to his third wife Stella, whom he met after his struggles with alcohol led to the dissolution of his first two marriages, opens in the industrial Welsh town of Port Talbot, his birthplace.

Beaten because of his poor grades at elementary school, he was branded ‘Dennis the Dunce’ by one teacher and ‘inept’ by another.

But Hopkins’s autobiography, ‘We Did Ok, Kid,’ exclusively obtained by the Daily Mail in advance of its official November 4 publication date, is no success story

‘I instinctively sensed exactly how to play Hannibal,’ he writes of the villain in Silence of the Lambs, ‘I have the devil in me. We all have the devil in us. I know what scares people’

The kids in the neighborhood labeled him ‘Elephant Head.’

‘My head was large and looked somewhat inappropriate stuck on top of a puny body,’ he explains. ‘My parents thought I was afflicted by water on the brain.’

A doctor assured Hopkins’ mother and father that he was normal and just needed ‘fattening up,’ but he felt so different and apart from everyone else that he refused to go to his own birthday parties.

‘My mother would throw them, but I hung around outside while inside they had games and cake,’ he says, confessing that he found solace in his ‘passive indifference.’

‘I enjoyed this newly discovered power,’ he writes. ‘Show no pain! Bury what pain there is, push it under the carpet, keep moving. It drove adults crazy, and that suited me fine.’

When Hopkins turned 17, his father told him, ‘You’re bloody hopeless. You’ll never get anywhere, never amount to anything in life.’

Hopkins vowed that he would survive by taking his chances and never getting close to anyone, ‘That strange feeling of being lost, not able to cope, has stayed with me through the many years of my life.’

The other paternal lessons that stuck with Hopkins were a love of poetry and a dependance on alcohol.

‘Drinking was a family tradition,’ he writes. His beloved Uncle Jim ‘died in an asylum in Glasgow. He drank himself to death.’

By the time Hopkins got his first job as a stage manager at 19, whiskey was his ‘favorite meal.’ Drinking gave him a comfort that he justified to himself because stars who were his heroes said it fostered creativity: ‘Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton, Nicol Williamson, Robert Stephens, Wilfrid Lawson. They were the legendary glory boys, the noisy heroes of sixties theater, all of them extremely gifted. I fell down the same rabbit hole. But I wasn’t a party drinker. I preferred drinking alone.’

In 1967, he married Petronella Barker, the daughter of upper-class BBC actors, the union rapidly deteriorated: ‘In the evenings, I bought bottles of whiskey at the off-license and took them back to the flat. My depression was boundless; the booze was my pacifier. I brooded. She raged.’

‘By the time we realized how awful a match we were, Petronella was pregnant,’ he says.

In 1967, he married Petronella Barker (pictured), the daughter of upper-class BBC actors, the union rapidly deteriorated

Pictured: Hopkins and his daughter Abigail

Pictured: Hopkins with his Oscar for ‘Silence of the Lambs’

His wife loathed his working-class parents and left the house when they came to London to visit the couple’s newborn daughter, Abigail.

‘I was impossible to live with; I have no doubt whatsoever of that,’ he writes. ‘I didn’t know how to cut through, how to become human, how to keep myself from slipping into darkness.

‘Petronella and I had frequent rows, but one night the fighting reached a new pitch. I returned from working on location in Scotland. Exhausted after endless days on set and the long trip home, I set down my suitcases in the hall.’

Before his coat was off, Petronella was mocking him.

‘Staring at me with utter contempt, she said, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “Oh, it’s Mr Lord High and Mighty! Welcome, lord and master!”

‘I had never been physically violent,’ Hopkins writes, ‘but in that moment, I was filled with such revulsion that I became afraid for both myself and her.’

So, whispering goodbye to 14-month-old Abigail, he picked up his luggage and left.

‘Aside from sending financial support, I didn’t have contact with Petronella and Abigail for a few years after that. It is the saddest fact of my life, and my greatest regret, and yet I feel absolutely sure that it would have been much worse for everyone if I’d stayed.’

Hopkins married his second wife, a film production assistant Jennifer Lynton, in 1973. Two years later, he was starring in Equus on Broadway, when he was hospitalized for a thrombosis in his right leg.

His heart and lungs would be typical for a ‘man of fifty or perhaps even sixty-five years of age,’ a doctor told him. ‘Men and women who live the social life that you seem to enjoy rarely make it to sixty.’

This second marriage lasted on paper until 2002. He had begun to cheat – and experience more frequent drunken blackouts.

Then came a terrifying epiphany.

Hopkins married his second wife, a film production assistant Jennifer Lynton (right), in 1973

The book is dedicated to his third wife Stella (left), who he met after his drinking admittedly destroyed his first two marriages

One Saturday night, he drove his car blackout drunk from Arizona to Beverly Hills, California: ‘I found out what I’d done when I went to my agent and said, “Someone’s stolen my car!” and my agent said, “Nobody stole it. We found you on the road. You would be in jail right now if we hadn’t.”

‘I could have killed someone,’ he writes. ‘I could have taken out a whole family.’

As he sobered up, lying in the sun under a eucalyptus tree, Hopkins says he ‘heard a voice ask me “Do you want to live or do you want to die?”

He answered, ‘I want to live.’ The voice, which he attributes to ‘the presence of God,’ told him, ‘It’s all over now. You can start living.’

‘The craving to drink left me,’ Hopkins writes. ‘That was eleven o’clock on December 29, 1975.’

He never touched booze again. But he failed to persuade his daughter Abigail to forgive him for abandoning her. (In an interview Hopkins said he has still not reconciled with Abigail, saying of her refusal to reunite, ‘Get over it. And if you can’t get over it, fine, good luck to you.’)

Hopkins did convince his parents to visit him in Hollywood after years of estrangement.

At a celebrity hangout, Hopkins and his parents ran into the actor John Wayne. Offering his hand to Hopkins, the Duke enthused, ‘Hey, kid, you’re a heck of an actor.’

‘Then he looked at my father,’ Hopkins says. ‘”You’re his dad? And you’re Mrs Hopkins?” He shook their hands. My father’s eyes filled with tears, at which John Wayne gave him a one-armed shoulder hug.’

They had thought he never would amount to anything, but ‘I’d showed them,’ he writes, without a hint of irony.