There is another overlap between Burton and Hopkins, and it’s not much fun. Neither man hesitated to reach for the bottle. If Burton’s diaries, published in 2012, are awash in alcohol, “We Did OK, Kid” is no less drenched. Both actors were the sons of souses (Dick Hopkins, on retiring from the baking trade, opened a pub), and the stuff was in their bloodstream. When Hopkins writes, “I bought myself a whiskey, which was becoming my favorite meal,” it’s a shock to realize that he’s discussing his early twenties. Even sitting alone with a drink, he smelled of trouble; “being quiet and withdrawn brings out something hostile in others,” as he acutely observes. The first of his three marriages, which took place in 1967, was a cataclysm, and inebriation played its part. His description of that time begins with a startling phrase that belongs to an earlier century – “I found a woman to marry” – and ends with his raging departure two years later. “I fled that life like it was a barn on fire,” Hopkins tells us. In the barn was a daughter, from whom he is still estranged.
What divides him from Burton is that Hopkins, by a miracle, summoned the clarity to renounce his own destruction. Maybe it was the news that he’d driven from Arizona to Los Angeles in an alcoholic blackout. (“We found you on the road,” his agent said.) The upshot is that he hasn’t drunk since the butt end of 1975 and, nearing ninety, is still employable, whereas Burton died at the age of fifty-eight, not long after playing O’Brien, the purveyor of pure bleakness, in a film of Orwell’s “1984.” From “The Player King” by Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, November 10, 2025