Sir Anthony Hopkins is 88 and just launched a classical music career

Sir Anthony Hopkins already has an Oscar, a knighthood and a career most actors would sell an organ for. At 88, he has decided none of that was quite enough, and has signed a record deal.

Hopkins has been composing music privately for more than six decades, going back to when he was a young actor at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1963. That private habit is now a proper album. Decca Classics has signed him for Life Is a Dream, out 21 August, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel and performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra.

The first single, Bracken Road, dropped this week. It comes from a piece called 1947, Suite for Solo Piano and Orchestra, and it is built on childhood memories of Margam in South Wales, described as a nostalgic portrait of the streets, meadows, farmland and mountains around his family home in the 1940s. The album also features pianist Sergio Tiempo, cellist Gregorio Nieto, the Bach Choir and the Boy Choristers of Winchester Cathedral, a genuinely stacked lineup for a debut composer of any age.

There is something quietly lovely about this that has nothing to do with celebrity novelty. This is not an actor dabbling in a vanity side project with a session band doing the heavy lifting. Hopkins has apparently been writing this material his entire adult life, decades before Hannibal Lecter made him a household name, and he is only now letting the world hear it. That is a very different story to a celebrity cash grab, and it shows in the level of talent Decca has assembled around him.

It also lands at a strange, good moment for late career reinventions. Audiences currently seem hungry for stories of people doing something genuinely new well into their eighties, rather than coasting on legacy. Hopkins composing an orchestral album at 88, with a piece he first conceived as a young actor sixty three years ago, fits that mood perfectly without trying to.

Bracken Road is streaming now if you want a preview before the full album lands next month. Go in expecting something closer to a quiet, personal record than a Hollywood victory lap, because that is exactly what it sounds like it is going to be.

*Image credit: Charlie Gray