Life could have gone very differently for Sir Anthony Hopkins. To hear one of the world’s greatest actors tell it, he would have chosen an alternative career path if he’d had the discipline to pursue his first love, music. “I didn’t have the skill as a musician or the patience with theory,” he says. “So, I have no technical knowledge.”
By all measure, he’s done just fine with his second choice, winning two Academy Awards and bringing unforgettable characters like The Silence of the Lambs’ charismatic serial killer Hannibal Lecter and The Remains of the Day’s repressed head butler James Stevens to the screen. And in some cases, he’s managed to combine his two passions.
Hopkins’ album of original classical compositions, Life Is a Dream, comes out Friday (Aug. 21) on Decca, offering the fullest public statement yet of the private musical life he has pursued alongside his screen career. The album was recorded in London with outgoing Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel leading the Philharmonia Orchestra.
“What drew me in was its authenticity,” Dudamel says via email of Hopkins’ music. “Anthony writes without pretense and he follows his own artistic instinct. When I spent time with his scores, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that they were written by one of the world’s great actors. I was simply responding to the music itself. It has warmth, imagination, and a very personal voice, and I felt it deserved to be heard.”
Life Is a Dream’s 12 pieces are largely nostalgic looks back at Hopkins’ life, from the dreamy, lush “Margam,” about where he grew up in Wales; to the boisterous, exhilarating “Fanfare and March” and the haunting, deeply romantic “Farewell My Love,” dedicated to his wife of 23 years, Stella.
In many ways, the pieces serve as a musical companion to his 2025 autobiography, We Did OK, Kid. “They’re all part of a great theme: that we’re here, but, finally, we have to say goodbye. That’s the poignancy and the beauty of life,” Hopkins says.
The album is also deeply influenced by his father, a baker, whom Hopkins watched struggle during the difficult post-World War II years as Europe rebuilt: “I look back at him with a kind of strange, morbid nostalgia, thinking, ‘That was it. That’s the bane of life. You get up and you get on with it.’
“Music for me is based on pain,” he continues. “Life is painful, and my music reflects that…That’s the beauty and eloquence of life, because no one in this world knows what happens once we close our eyes and die.”
Sitting in the living room of the Grace Kelly suite at Los Angeles’ Hotel Bel-Air in a bright lime pullover, tan jacket and khakis, Hopkins, 88, sips on tea and declines the plate of cookies on the table. “I became fastidious [about eating] during the pandemic,” he says. He discusses a lifetime of making music in a voice still beautifully mellifluous, but softer than it once was.
He started playing piano when he was 7, just after World War II ended, on a wooden-frame upright that his mother bought for £4 and 10 pence. (“I’ve got this weird head for numbers,” he says, of his ability to remember exactly how much the piano cost more than 80 years later). He became enamored with José Iturbi, the noted concert pianist who played himself in such movies as 1945’s Anchors Away and 1948’s Three Daring Daughters. “And what do you know? In 1950, he actually came to South Wales,” he recalls in a hushed tone. “So, I went there at the age of 12 and I got his autograph. I couldn’t believe it.”
Hopkins learned how to read music and started writing his own compositions. He read books about Beethoven, but it was French composer Delibes and “Flower Duet” from his 1883 opera Lakmé “that cut into me like a knife,” he says. “There’s something about the female voice and then the cello.”
Hopkins’ first public composition was a “little waltz” he wrote when he was 21 or 22 for a mime play in which he played Cupid. (“I looked ridiculous,” he laughs.) Despite his fellow actors’ encouragement, he shrugged it off, “because I’ve always had that imposter syndrome, feeling like I wasn’t good enough at anything.” He kept at it, though, composing the sweeping “Bracken Road” in 1963 in the greenroom while he was appearing at The Liverpool Playhouse. That composition, part of Hopkins’ “1947: Suite for the Solo Piano and Orchestra,” is the oldest on Life Is a Dream, while the lullaby-like “Tara,” written for his niece in late 2025, is the most recent.
For Hopkins, composing flexes a different muscle from acting, where he is reciting someone else’s words as opposed to creating something new from deep within — with a little mystical help. “It’s thrilling,” Hopkins says of writing music. “I have to pay homage to whatever that invisible thing is, because I have no idea. I mean, we come out of the womb, we have no power to understand anything. We know nothing. I do believe there is a divine power within all of us. We choose to use it or we don’t.”
Life Is a Dream may be the first time many fans have heard Hopkins’ classical compositions, but the album is just the latest example of his musical pursuits. He composed the score for his 1996 film August, getting invaluable advice from noted film composer and friend George Fenton (Gandhi, Shadowlands, Groundhog Day), who taught him how to write to picture. Hopkins was concerned that he wasn’t adhering to traditional structures, such as timing, and Fenton simply said to him, “‘It sounds beautiful. Why become academic about it?’” freeing Hopkins to follow his heart, not rules. Hopkins recalls, “He said, ‘Overcome your fears, just do it.’”
In 2012, Hopkins released Composer, a nine-track collection performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. That same year, he won a Classic Brit Award for album of the year for “And the Waltz Goes On,” which served as the title track to Dutch violinist André Rieu’s album (and appears on Life Is a Dream). Last year, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra premiered Hopkins’ 2024 composition, “Two Pieces for Orchestra,” in Riyadh.
Hopkins does his own orchestration as he composes: “I hear these instruments back to me and I’m guided by something inside me that shows me how to write it,” he says.
But he’s also embraced modern technology, often working with British composer-programmer Steve Barton. “He’s a genius whiz kid with this stuff. I don’t understand how to turn on the television. I don’t know how to make a cup of tea,” Hopkins jokes. Hopkins will play a piece on the piano, then orchestrate it with Barton’s help and software, describing the instrumentation as it comes to him for Barton to program. “What a world we live in of sheer scientific genius,” he says. “So why not use it?”
At the end of last year, Hopkins connected with Dudamel through his fellow actor Bradley Cooper and mutual friend/dermatologist, Dr. Maria Teresa Ochoa.
Dudamel says there wasn’t one specific piece that convinced him to work with Hopkins so much as his entire body of work. “I discovered a composer who is genuinely curious and unafraid to express himself,” he says. “Each work revealed a different side of his musical personality, and together they convinced me there was something meaningful to explore.”
In April, Dudamel led the 95-piece orchestra at London’s Alexandra Palace, joined by noted musicians pianist Sergio Tiempo and cellist Gregorio Nieto.
Hopkins says it was “extraordinary” to be on the soundstage hearing his music brought to life. “I’m sitting there thinking, ‘I wrote this?’” he says. He was also in awe of the talent surrounding him: “Watching all the strings, woodwinds, horns, harps, piano and then the chorus — not one of the musicians is thinking, ‘What do I play next?’ They’re so trained. They’re so disciplined. We talk about acting; forget it. Music, you’ve got to know your stuff. Actors can get away with murder. Those musicians are geniuses. What I love is they’re not affected actors: ‘Don’t look at me.’ There’s no nonsense.”
Next up, Dudamel will perform Hopkins’ composition “Stella Aria,” from Life Is a Dream, Sunday (Aug. 23) at the Hollywood Bowl as part of A Concert for Venezuela: A Benefit to Support Earthquake Relief.
And new music is on the way. His piece, “Goodbye,” will appear in Guy Ritchie’s October film Wife & Dog, in which Hopkins plays the head of an affluent gang of killers. After hearing Hopkins tinkering on set, Ritchie spontaneously asked him to play the piece in a prominent scene in the movie in character. “He’s different than any director I’ve ever worked with,” Hopkins says of Ritchie. “It’s ‘Right, do a bit of this, a bit of that.’ There’s no ‘Darling,’ and all that.”
Hopkins still practices piano most days. “Complicated stuff, too,” he says. Right now, he’s playing Rachmaninoff works in E Minor: “Very fast, chromatic stuff. And some Chopin.”
Following performances of his music in Riyadh and Los Angeles, he hopes more symphonies — specifically in New York, London and Wales — will play his compositions. In the meantime, he will continue to compose. “I write out of sheer joy of being alive, because that’s what it is,” he says. “And at the end of it all, we better make the most of it.”