From heavy metal god to Hannibal Lecter: five new celebrity memoirs

As we head towards Christmas, a slew of movie stars and musician memoirs have hit the shelves – here are some of the biggest in recent weeks.

We Did Ok, Kid: A Memoir
Anthony Hopkins
Simon & Schuster, $55

Seeing Laurence Olivier’s performance in Hamlet sparked an awakening to pursue performing in a young Anthony Hopkins.

“I felt that Olivier as Hamlet was speaking to me, referring to some long-vanished, ancient part of myself,” the Oscar-winner writes in his new memoir. In We Did Ok, Kid, the 87-year-old remembers mastering many geniuses – and some villains – across his long career, including in films The Silence of the Lambs, Hitchcock and The Elephant Man.

He was the son of a Welsh baker who few had serious hopes for – some teachers even thought he was “slow” – until Olivier and Shakespeare came calling in adolescence. After discovering the joy of poetry and then amateur acting through the YMCA drama club, Hopkins left high school with no real plan, and within a decade was sharing the stage with Olivier at London’s Old Vic theatre.

He says the acclaimed actor who instilled in him the need to fully inhabit a character. This tutelage would set him on his own trajectory to become one of our own most respected thespians.

Anthony Hopkins in 1984.

After quitting the National Theatre Company in a fit of temper - a quality he would become known for, and that he addresses in the book, attributing it to his alcoholism and early bullying - he fell into his first television role (in the 1974 miniseries based on Leon Uris’ QB VII), which led to further screen roles, and he found that he preferred that medium to the stage.

Across his long career, he would go on to play everyone from Hitler to Herod, from Freud to Pope Benedict XVI. And yet, it’s his Oscar-winning turn as Dr Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 blockbuster Silence of The Lambs with which he is most often associated, and he talks at length about the role, describing his approach to the character, which he says he knew would be “life-changing” as soon as he read the script.

Hopkins might be forthcoming on his coming-of-age journey, but remains reticent when it comes to sharing any Hollywood dish and behind-the-scenes intrigue. The decorated actor is also far more generous waxing lyrical on the craft than he is recounting his past romantic life or anything too personal. Fans will find by the end of his book, the actor remains something of an enigma.

Still, his insights on acting are perceptive, as are his frankness about personal failure (including his battle with alcoholism). There’s also a healthy dose of levity; when his agent first handed Hopkins the script for The Silence of the Lambs, he asked: “Is it a children’s film?”

Last Rites: Never-before-told stories of a legendary life from the rock ‘n’ roll hellraiser
Ozzy Osbourne
Little, Brown Book Group, $34.99

Death eluded metal pioneer Ozzy Osbourne for much of his life despite many frequent run-ins. There was his tour bus being hit by a plane, breaking his neck in a quad-bike accident and a fall later that did damage to his replacement rod. (That’s not to mention the decades of abusing hard drugs.) Now in Last Rites, the memoir he finished before his death in July, the metal icon acknowledges that he has finally accepted the end: “Death’s been knocking at my door for the last six years, louder and louder … And at some point, I’m gonna have to let him in.”

Osbourne recalls here the last two decades of his life, a period where his health badly deteriorated and his sobriety faltered. A steroid addiction proved a tough obstacle for the Black Sabbath frontman, as the drug habit triggered “roid rages” so bad that wife Sharon hired a “military guy” to lord over Osbourne to detox.

There are also some final confessions, including stressing that he maintained no ill-will against Ronnie James Dio, the singer who replaced him in Black Sabbath. What is also conveyed is a genuine love for Sharon and their complicated marriage, one that has had many dark moments (including a 1989 incident where he was arrested for her attempted murder). While there have been many personal failures and professional setbacks, Sharon has remained stalwart and devoted across their many years together. The “Prince of Darkness” proves unfiltered, if occasionally scattered, in his final remembrances. But like a long conversation with a close friend, Last Rites is an unscripted and satisfying experience.

Vagabond
Tim Curry
Century, $55

Tim Curry starts his own memoir by stipulating that despite not limiting himself “artistically, professionally, sexually or mentally”, that he won’t be “dishing out lurid details of my love affairs” in his memoir.

ButVagabond is unreserved in chronicling his career many playing villains, outsiders and even monsters. Perhaps best known for his role as Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Curry’s love for the stage first awakened during his years at boarding school. There he discovered the power of acting, drawn to roles that were “discordant or incompatible” with his own identity. Rocky Horror was one avenue to express this feeling, even if it later led to heavy drug use. He never suggests problems with addiction, but does concede he “snorted most of Peru.”

Elsewhere, there are frank reflections on how he channelled his cold mother (a woman with a “rather harsh, doom-laden view of life”) in performances to best capture the detachment they needed and also recounts his devastating 2012 stroke, which left him paralysed on his left side.

But as his career attests, playing outcasts – including in Annie, IT and Legend – had its benefits. The ongoing adoration the film Rocky Horror enjoys is a source of personal pleasure, with the “crowd’s engagement … a true delight to behold”. A sometimes guarded but often witty personal history, Vagabond captures one restless actor making his career more colourful by choosing to play the pariah.

Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis
Priscilla Presley
Headline, $34.99

Our fascination with Elvis Presley and ex-wife Priscilla has not abated, even after almost five decades since the King’s passing. Thanks to recent biopics - Elvis by Baz Luhrmann and Priscilla by Sofia Coppola - the pair’s relationship has returned to the zeitgeist, one Priscilla herself re-examines in her memoir Softly, As I Leave You. To start: the 80-year-old is still defensive about their courtship, insisting that even though they first met when she was 14, they never dated until she was 17. “Much has been made of the ten-year age gap between us, but it wasn’t unusual in the South,” she writes.

While it’s terrain she previously charted in her 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, she now wants to make new disclosures on her complicated relationship with daughter Lisa Marie. In particular, she wants to rebuke those who chose to exploit the Presley name via her child – namely Michael Jackson. Priscilla believed the Thriller singer was a “manipulative man” who married her daughter for PR purposes as he “desperately needed good publicity” following allegations of child sex abuse.

Nevertheless, Softly, As I Leave You also proves a poignant reflection on Elvis’s legacy and his lost dynasty. There are many sad moments that punctuate this book, not least of which is daughter Lisa Marie’s lifelong struggles with addiction and her untimely death in 2023. “For generations, we Presleys have had to bury our children,” Priscilla writes. It may frustratingly omit much on Priscilla’s own personal life since Elvis’s death, but still reads as a heartfelt account of a famed life bedevilled by much tragedy.

Truly
Lionel Richie
William Collins, $37.99

For someone as famous as Lionel Richie, the singer remains humbled by his own celebrity and the fortunes fame has afforded him. In Truly, the Hello and All Night Long crooner emerges as a special kind of celebrity totally uncorrupted by the limelight, a trait that is sure to endear the 76-year-old to many. From his humble beginnings in a segregated Deep South to his time fronting funk band The Commodores, Richie credits his enduring success to his talents for songwriting. And there are many hits to account for.

Penning romantic ballads like Endless Love and Easy, helped him transition to a solo career that led to stratospheric heights in the 1980s. So successful was his music on the charts he even jokes, “I was sick of me”. Richie can be circumspect, however, in refusing the temptation to relitigate music history (like the break-up with the Commodores).
He instead shows more directness discussing his own personal failures. The biggest came when he suffered a nervous breakdown in the early 1990s, drowning in a “daily bottle of Cristal” as the weight of his father’s passing, a messy divorce and difficulties with his vocal cords proved too great. A career revival in his twilight years – thanks to American Idol and the 2015 “Legends” slot at Glastonbury – has recently seen the Grammy-winner count his blessings again for making his songbook reach new audiences.

Truly makes for pleasurable reading thanks to Richie’s warmth and amiability, braiding many personal admissions with odes to music’s euphoric potential. Music lovers will delight.

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