“I look at my life and remember that hapless little boy, and I think, How did all this happen?” This question animates Hopkins’s memoir, in which he recounts his path to becoming an actor. Hopkins was born in 1937, in the steel town of Port Talbot, Wales, to a family of bakers. (A silver cup bearing the legend “Arthur Richard Hopkins 1924, First Prize for Currant Buns” remains in his possession, to go with the Oscars he won for “The Father” and “The Silence of the Lambs.”) After an “explosive” encounter with Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet,” in boarding school, Hopkins went on to traffic back and forth between the grand realms of British classical theatre and the badlands of the movies. Much of Hopkins’s book, which seems to have been written without the aid of a ghostwriter, unfolds in stop-start rhythms, with some reckonings so curt that they approach the brink of Beckett: “No tears. No grief. Nothing. Too much agony.” Yet, for Hopkins devotees, that percussive tone—the hard, peremptory music of his speech—is precisely what marks him out.