Sir Anthony Hopkins, the Oscar-winning actor who turns 89 this year, has composed a full orchestral album drawn from a lifetime of music, and says the piano, not the camera, was always his true calling.
The album, titled "Life Is a Dream," features 12 compositions Hopkins crafted over six decades, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel and performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra. Decca Records will release it on August 21. The recording sessions took place in April at Alexandra Palace in London, with Dudamel, one of the most acclaimed conductors working today, leading the orchestra through pieces that span Hopkins' life from postwar Wales to the present.
Hopkins told the Associated Press that music, not acting, was his original passion. He started playing piano at age four and wrote his first composition, a waltz, in 1960, when he was 22 years old. Acting came second, almost by accident.
"My first love, or vocation really, is music. That sounds very official, but I was raised with a lot of music (of the) postwar years, and it influenced me. And I started playing the piano when I was quite young."
The distinction Hopkins draws between his two careers is sharp. He described acting as "a discipline, you have to know your stuff," but called music "a freewheeling kind of art form." He said he finds more freedom in composing than he ever found on a film set.
The album exists in part because of Bradley Cooper. A few years before the recording, Cooper witnessed a performance of one of Hopkins' compositions by the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Seal. Cooper then connected Hopkins to Dudamel, who agreed to take on the project. Hopkins is not one for false modesty about the result, but he is genuinely bewildered by it.
"I'm sitting there thinking, 'How the h*** did I write this?' I have no idea."
Dudamel, for his part, issued a statement praising the work in terms that treat Hopkins as a serious composer, not a celebrity hobbyist. He said the album carries "the same depth of imagination, humanity and emotional truth" that defined Hopkins' screen career, and that Hopkins "approaches music with the heart of a storyteller and the instincts of a poet."
Hopkins is far from the only veteran entertainer pursuing a creative second act in his late years. But the scope of this project, a dozen orchestral compositions, a world-class conductor, a storied London venue, sets it apart from the vanity releases that sometimes accompany celebrity forays into music.
Hopkins said the album is rooted in memory. One of the named compositions, "1947: Suite for Solo Piano and Orchestra," draws on a summer in South Wales. The year 1947 also holds personal weight: Hopkins has cited a film called "Carnegie Hall" from that year as formative in his life.
He was blunt about what the music carries beneath its surface:
"It's basically the memories of my childhood and growing up in Wales, and my developments in life, my adolescent years. There's a great sadness in it all because, don't get me wrong, I've had a wonderful life, but underneath it all, there is the knowledge that life is one long goodbye. From the moment we're born, we begin to die."
Then he caught himself: "Sounds so cheerful!"
The first single, drawn from the album's opening suite, channels what Hopkins called "melancholy and sadness", "the welcomed sound of nostalgia, of the strange, whimsical pain of life." A second track, "Stella Aria," is named for his wife Stella Hopkins, a director and actor. He described that piece as expressing "the loneliness in all of us."
Hopkins has composed for film before. He wrote music for "Shadowlands" in 1993, calling its opening "my first adventure in composing music." He also composed for "August" in 1996, "Slipstream" in 2007, and "Elyse" in 2020. But those were scores attached to other projects. "Life Is a Dream", its title borrowed from a play by the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, is entirely his own.
The album arrives after Hopkins published a memoir last fall titled "We Did OK, Kid," another late-career project that looked backward at a life shaped by chance and persistence. Other veteran performers have similarly refused to slow down in their eighties and nineties, treating age as irrelevant to creative ambition.
Hopkins reflected on the improbability of his own career with a frankness that comes from having nothing left to prove. He recalled deciding to become an actor roughly 70 years ago, not out of grand vision but because he was, by his own account, "pretty useless in school" and didn't know what else to do. He tried for a scholarship, became an actor instead of a musician, and then, as he put it, was "given a huge plate of success by some force of nature."
He also spoke openly about impostor syndrome, a term he seemed to reach for in real time during the interview.
"There's a part of me which says, 'you didn't write that.' What's it called? Impostor syndrome."
That self-doubt sits alongside a clear-eyed calm about mortality. Hopkins said he is "without fear" of death and "just so grateful I've lived this long." He is 88 and will turn 89 by year's end.
His ambitions, though, are not finished. Hopkins said he wants to perform at Carnegie Hall, the same venue his mother once told him he would play. "You play at Carnegie Hall one day," she said, as Hopkins recalled it. No booking has been announced, but Hopkins was direct about the goal: "That's where I want to go. That's what I want."
In an era when legacy and late-career recognition carry real weight in the entertainment world, Hopkins' album stands as something different, not a tribute or a retrospective, but new work from a man who insists the best of what he has to offer was never on screen in the first place.
Hopkins described all music as rooted in pain, "sounds pretty preposterous, but it is," he said. "It's about the yearning." At 88, with six decades of compositions finally recorded by a world-class orchestra, the yearning has a name, a release date, and a label willing to bet on it.
Some people spend a lifetime chasing a second act. Hopkins spent his waiting for the first one to finally arrive.
