Not many people can say they've been given a private piano recital by Sir Anthony Hopkins.

But that's exactly what happened when our four-strong BBC team went to interview the double Oscar-winning actor in Los Angeles.

We were in the same room as the man who terrified as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, shattered as a butler in The Remains of The Day and devastated as a dad with dementia in The Father.

An actor who was cast by Oliver Stone as President Nixon because - according to Sir Anthony - the director said "you're nuts like Nixon".

At a grand piano in a hotel in Beverly Hills, as he plays us a piece he calls Goodbye, it's clear an artistic soul exudes from his every pore. Haunting notes of music, lines of poetry and Shakespearean verses cascade out of him.

We were meeting because Sir Anthony's publishing his autobiography, We Did OK, Kid, an honest and at times upsetting account of a loner who was bullied and written off as a child in Wales and became one of Britain's finest acting exports.

He puts his success down to sheer luck, telling me: "I couldn't take credit for any of it, I couldn't have planned any of this - and now at 87, about to turn 88, I get up in the morning and I think, 'Hello, I'm still here,' and I still don't get it."

From the outside, it looks less about luck and more about his deep understanding of human emotion, as his performances testify. I ask what makes him such an instinctive actor.

"It's such a miracle being alive," he says.

He finds the complexity of human beings "fascinating... I mean, how can you produce Beethoven, Bach and then Treblinka and Auschwitz?"

Sir Anthony has always understood the duality of being human, and it explains his acting range.

He got his first break on film when the actor Peter O'Toole suggested he audition for the 1968 movie The Lion in Winter, in which O'Toole was playing Henry II.

At that point, Sir Anthony had been a member of Sir Laurence Olivier's National Theatre company for several years. But, he recalls: "I couldn't fit into the British theatre style, I just felt out of it."

He also "didn't want to be standing on stage holding a spear for the rest of my life, in wrinkled tights, I just wanted to have a bit of a life".

He was cast as Richard the Lionheart and couldn't believe that a baker's son from Port Talbot was working with Katharine Hepburn.

The actress, playing his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, gave him "the best advice I've had" as they rehearsed their first scene together. She told him to "just speak the lines... Don't act, just do it". She also said he was "real good".

Hepburn was right, of course. Some classically trained theatre actors, particularly back then, didn't appreciate how much they needed to adjust their performance for the intimacy of a camera. He did.

He doesn't much care for talking about the craft of acting, or certainly the reverence there can be around it, but he shares his method with me: "Be still. Be economic. Don't act or twitch around, you........

© BBC