Sir Anthony Hopkins will never retire

Sir Anthony Hopkins will never retire.

The 81-year-old actor says he is a workaholic and has no plans to ever give up acting but his wife Stella Arroyave, 63, can force him to take a break.

Speaking in the Dec/Jan issue of AARP the Magazine, he said: "I'm a workaholic. I act; I paint; I play music; I read a lot. It keeps the brain active. I'll go on working until I drop.

"Stella is good at keeping me in a harness. I spend hours in the studio painting, and she'll come in and say, 'Enough.' I don't have much common sense."

Anthony - who is currently playing Pope Benedict XVI in the Netflix film The Two Popes - also revealed that Stella is working on a documentary about him.

He said: "One of my teachers told her I was a mystery [when I was young]. I didn't speak to other kids; I didn't play sports; I didn't even go to the school plays. But I was tired of being called stupid, and I thought, 'One day I'll show you all.' And I became this other person. My career took off."

Meanwhile, Anthony admitted that his most famous role - that of serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs franchise - completely changed his life.

He explained: "I have an instinct for those kinds of people. They're narcissists. I don't know if that's in me - I just understand them. And I'll never escape from that guy. When I started reading The Silence of the Lambs script, I told my agent, 'This is the part of a lifetime.' It changed everything for me."