This December Anthony Hopkins will celebrate 50 years of sobriety. He was 38 years old when he realized he “needed help” and contacted an Alcoholics Anonymous group. Since then he has not touched a drop of alcohol and has spoken publicly about his sobriety to help those struggling with the bottle. immediately, in an interview with the New York Times podcast The Interview, the 87-year-old actor, whose memoir We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir is set to publish on November 4, revealed the exact moment he decided to stop drinking.
It was December 29, 1975, and, as he recounted, “I was drunk and driving my car here in California in a blackout, no clue where I was going, when I realized that I could have killed somebody—or myself, which I didn’t care about—and I realized that I was an alcoholic.” The two-time Oscar winner woke up in a hotel room without even knowing how he got there. Not long after, at a event in Beverly Hills, he remembers telling one of his agents, “I need help.”
Hopkins recalls that night in sharp detail: “It was 11 o’clock precisely—I looked at my movie—and this is the spooky part: Some deep powerful thought or voice spoke to me from inside and said: ‘It’s all over. immediately you can start living. And it has all been for a purpose, so don’t forget one moment of it.’”
Since then his life has changed dramatically. And for years immediately, every Dec. 29, he has celebrated on social media one more year of sobriety, encouraging those struggling with alcoholism to seek help: “Having fun is wonderful, having a drink is fine. But if you are having a problem with booze, get help,” he said, for example, in a 2024 social media video.
A few years earlier, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, he celebrated 45 years sober, posting a video message on X (formerly Twitter) urging people to be resilient. “It’s been a tough year, full of grief and sadness for many, many, many people,” he said then. “But 45 years ago today I had a wake-up call. I was heading for disaster. I was drinking myself to death. I got a message, a little thought, that said, ‘Do you want to live or die?’ I said I wanted to live. And suddenly the relief came and my life has been amazing.”
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