---
title: "At 88, Anthony Hopkins releases his first album of his own music"
description: "Anthony Hopkins is known the world over as an actor, but music, he says, was his first love. Now, at 88, the two-time Oscar winner has signed with Decca Classics and will release 'Life Is a Dream,' an album of his own compositions performed by a full orchestra, in August."
category: "Entertainment"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/entertainment
author: "Elias Rosen"
published: 2026-07-10T06:56:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-10T06:56:00.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/at-88-anthony-hopkins-releases-his-first-album-of-his-own-music
tags: ["anthony-hopkins", "classical-music", "decca-classics", "music", "film"]
---
# At 88, Anthony Hopkins releases his first album of his own music

Anthony Hopkins is known the world over as an actor, but music, he says, was his first love. Now, at 88, the two-time Oscar winner has signed with Decca Classics and will release 'Life Is a Dream,' an album of his own compositions performed by a full orchestra, in August.

For a man celebrated for one of cinema's great careers, Anthony Hopkins keeps insisting the spotlight was pointed at the wrong art all along. "Music was my first desire, my first wish," he has said. "I've been composing music all my life."

## The album

At 88, Hopkins has signed with Decca Classics and will release "Life Is a Dream," his first album devoted to his own compositions, on August 21, [RTE reported](https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2026/0710/1582621-anthony-hopkins-signs-record-deal-as-composer/). The pieces are performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the Grammy-winning conductor Gustavo Dudamel, giving Hopkins' private passion the full weight of a world-class ensemble. He called the deal "the honour of a lifetime."

The first single, "Bracken Road," comes from a suite on the record and offers a taste of the collection's mood, drawn from a lifetime of writing music quietly alongside the acting.

## A lifelong composer

Hopkins has told interviewers that music came before everything else, that he sat at the piano as a small child and never stopped. Over the decades his compositions surfaced occasionally, most famously the waltz "And the Waltz Goes On," but he never before gathered his own work into a proper album under a major classical label. Much of the writing reaches back through his life and to his Welsh roots, the son, as he has often noted, of a baker.

## Why it resonates

There is something fitting about a great actor turning, late in life, to the art he says he loved first. Hopkins brings to composition the same instinct for emotion and narrative that defined his screen work, and the involvement of Dudamel and the Philharmonia signals that this is more than a celebrity vanity project. "Life Is a Dream" arrives August 21, a debut record from an 88-year-old who has, by his own account, simply been waiting his whole career to be heard this way.