Anthony Hopkins to release classical album built over six decades

Anthony Hopkins has signed with Decca Classics for Life Is a Dream, a classical album built from more than six decades of his own compositions and scheduled for release on Aug. 21. The first single, Bracken Road, was released Friday, giving the 88-year-old two-time Academy Award winner his most formal move yet into recorded classical music.

Hopkins has said music was his first desire and that he has been composing throughout his life, a history that makes the album read less like a celebrity detour than the public gathering of work that has long existed in private. The project brings together orchestral pieces written across different periods, including compositions that had been sitting for years before being assembled for this release. Gustavo Dudamel helped shape the recording, and Hopkins thanked him for guiding the project.

The album also reaches back to one of Hopkins’s earliest known pieces, And the Waltz Goes On, which he composed in 1964 when he was in his 20s. That waltz later appeared on André Rieu’s 2011 album of the same name, showing that Hopkins’s music has circulated for years outside the world that made him famous on screen. The new album deepens that thread, bringing earlier work into a full-length classical release under Hopkins’s own name.

Hopkins has also spent the last year making music and writing part of the public record around his later career. He hosted a concert in Riyadh in January 2025 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and attended the Joy Awards there, placing his compositions before an international audience in a setting far removed from film sets and award stages. Simon & Schuster later announced We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir by Sir Anthony Hopkins for Nov. 4, 2025, and said rights had been sold in more than 20 territories.

Life Is a Dream adds another layer to that late-life output: a work that gathers music Hopkins wrote over decades and presents it as a coherent body of authorship. For an actor whose name has long carried cinematic weight, the album makes a quieter argument about legacy, one built not on novelty but on the persistence of a parallel artistic life.