Sir Anthony Hopkins says he 'returns' to Wales 'most days' on Google Maps

Sir Anthony Hopkins may have left Wales to become a Hollywood star decades ago, but he says he returns home in his mind almost every day, often looking around his old neighbourhood on Google Maps.

"I go to streets and move up the street, the photographs of my streets in Wales... I'm always going back there," said the Port Talbot-born Oscar-winner.

Sir Anthony, 88, was speaking after the release of his first album that he said had been inspired by his childhood memories.

He said he was now a "bit too old" to go back to Margam, Port Talbot to walk the streets.

"I love going back to the streets," he said in an interview with ITV Wales from his home in Los Angeles.

"Now time is running out.

"I wish I could just get out and walk around but I'm getting a bit too old for that," he said.

"But I'm always going back there... most days I'm back there somehow."

Sir Anthony - who has been nominated for an Academy Award six times, winning twice, including for his role as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs - has written his own music since childhood, and began playing piano aged four.

He studied acting at Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff because it had a music school.

"A few years later, I was in a film with Peter O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn.

"It doesn't make any sense at all."

One of his new compositions, he said, came from a time he had remembered living on Bracken Road in Port Talbot and his mother had made him lemon curd sandwiches.

"We didn't have anything at all.

"I remember I could see right across to the moors and the sea.

"And I remember the stillness, the sound of flies and distant cattle and distant traffic.

"I remember that afternoon with my lemon curd sandwich and that's all I remember, but I remember it so indelibly, the feeling of it."

Sir Anthony said his identity came from growing up in Wales.

"The land of hiraeth [longing]... the land of my fathers, big boisterous choruses at the Cardiff Arms Park in the international matches, Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau [Land of my Fathers] and the song Cwm Rhondda, powerful stuff and that's my identity."

He said his dreams of Hollywood as a young man probably had started in Port Talbot's Plaza Cinema, which started to show American films after World War Two.

He said he had been attracted to the "brashness" of Americans who had never been apologetic.

Now off the back of releasing his first album towards the end of his eighth decade, he said he was too old for self-doubt.

"Now it's party time.

"I wake up in the morning and think, I'm still here. Wow. Thank you.

"I've had troubles in my life, as we all have.

"But I look back thinking, what a life I've had, beyond my greatest dreams."