Dustin Hoffman

• 1. Introduction

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  When Dustin Hoffman told his family he wanted to be an actor, his Aunt Pearl had a ready answer. "You can't be an actor. You are not good-looking enough."

  Hoffman was born in Los Angeles in 1937, and her prediction aged badly. He went on to collect two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, five Golden Globes and two Primetime Emmys, plus a Tony nomination. He did it as a leading man of New Hollywood, a performer known for antiheroes and emotionally vulnerable characters rather than matinee-idol swagger.

  How does a man judged unfit for the screen end up defining what a screen star can look like? Why did the directors who worked with him describe devotion, obsession and furious arguments in the same breath? And what happens inside an actor who spent decades collecting honors while doubting that any of them were his to keep?

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• 2. Uncastable

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  Harry Hoffman worked as a prop supervisor at Columbia Pictures before he became a furniture salesman, and his younger son grew up with the movie business close at hand. Dustin Lee was named after Dustin Farnum, a stage and silent screen actor. His elder brother, Ronald, became a lawyer and economist.

  The family descended from Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants who came from Kiev and from Iași. In Russia the surname was written Goikhman. The household was nonreligious. Hoffman has said he remembers no Jewish holidays from his childhood and only realized he was Jewish at around the age of ten.

  In 1955 Hoffman graduated from Los Angeles High School and enrolled at Santa Monica College, meaning to study medicine. Music was his first ambition. He had studied piano for much of his youth and hoped to become a classical pianist. "I just was not gifted in music. I did not have an ear," he later said. An acting class he took on the assumption that it would be easy gave him what he called the acting bug, and he left the college the following year for the Pasadena Playhouse.

  His first role there came alongside Gene Hackman, a future Academy Award winner. After two years Hackman moved to New York, and Hoffman soon followed. For much of the 1960s Hoffman, Hackman and Robert Duvall shared living quarters while hunting for work. Hackman recalled that none of them imagined succeeding in films. "We just wanted to work," he said.

  Duvall joked that Hoffman looked like Barbra Streisand in drag. Vanity Fair later wrote that his looks and small stature made him uncastable. Hoffman picked up television bit parts and commercials, and when money ran short he briefly left acting to teach. He studied at the Actors Studio and became a committed method actor, and he also worked with Lee Strasberg. By his own account he spent about ten years on odd jobs and unemployment.

  The stage kept him alive. His Broadway debut came in 1961, with a bit part in A Cook for Mr. General. In 1965 he stage-managed and appeared in Ulu Grosbard's Broadway production of The Subject Was Roses. On the 16th of October 1966 he opened in Eh?, the American premiere of Henry Livings's play at the Circle in the Square Theatre, and it earned him a Drama Desk Award. Producer Sidney W. Pink spotted him in an off-Broadway role and cast him in Madigan's Millions.

  His film debut was The Tiger Makes Out, in 1967, opposite Eli Wallach. As soon as filming wrapped, Hoffman flew to Fargo, North Dakota, to direct two plays for the Fargo-Moorhead Community Theatre. The eight-week contract paid $1,000, and that sum was all he had to live on until the movie money arrived.

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• 3. The Graduate

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  Mike Nichols auditioned Hoffman in 1966 for the Broadway musical The Apple Tree and turned him down because he could not sing well enough. Alan Alda got the part. Nichols had been so struck by the audition, however, that he offered Hoffman the male lead in a film instead.

  That film was The Graduate, released in 1967. Hoffman played Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate who begins an affair with Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's law partner. He earned an Academy Award nomination but lost to Rod Steiger, who won for In the Heat of the Night.

  The film was a gigantic hit for Embassy Pictures. Life magazine's David Zeitlin joked that if Hoffman's face were his fortune, he would be committed to a life of poverty. Time called Hoffman a symbol of youth and the face of a new breed of actors. Screenwriter Buck Henry argued that the performance reshaped taste itself: "A whole generation changed its idea of what guys should look like."

  Critic Sam Kashner heard an echo of Nichols's old comedy partnership with Elaine May in many scenes. Henry noticed that Hoffman had absorbed his director's mannerisms. The little noises the character makes, Henry said, came straight from Mike. Hoffman, for his part, gave Nichols the credit. "It took tremendous courage," he said of casting an unknown in the part.

  Fans responded with thousands of letters, according to biographer Jeff Lenburg. One reader wrote to The New York Times that he thought of Ben as a spiritual brother. Friends from Hoffman's struggling years told him, "You were the last one I expected to make it."

  The money told a different story. Hoffman was paid $20,000 for the role, but taxes and living expenses left him with just $4,000. Once that ran out he applied for New York State unemployment benefits of $55 a week and lived in a two-room apartment in the West Village.

  He turned down most of the film offers that followed and went back to the stage in the musical Jimmy Shine, which won him another Drama Desk Award. He still thought of himself as a theater person, like Hackman and Duvall. "I told them, 'I'm going out to make this movie. Don't worry, I'm coming right back,'" he remembered.

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• 4. Becoming Someone Else

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  John Schlesinger had seen The Graduate, and he could not believe the polite, button-down track star on screen was acting. Biskind wrote that the director seemed unable to comprehend that fact. Hoffman wanted the role of Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy partly because critics had decided he was no character actor, which wounded him.

  So he arranged a meeting with Schlesinger in Times Square, dressed as a homeless man. He wore a dirty raincoat, slicked his hair back and skipped shaving. Schlesinger was won over. "I've only seen you in the context of The Graduate, but you'll do quite well," he admitted.

  Midnight Cowboy reached theaters across the United States in May 1969. It earned Hoffman his second Oscar nomination and won Best Picture. In 1994 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry as culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. In Little Big Man the following year, Hoffman played Jack Crabb, who ages from a teenager to a man of 121.

  Bob Fosse's Lenny, from 1974, gave Hoffman the life of the stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, who died at the age of 40. Hoffman first turned the part down, doubting the script and whether he was the right actor. Then he read Bruce's autobiography and studied films of his live shows. He came to feel an affinity, and he noted that Bruce was a provocateur and that he loved to provoke. Critic Judith Crist said he vanished into the persona with stunning effectiveness. The film drew six Academy Award nominations, with Hoffman nominated again for Best Actor.

  All the President's Men followed in 1976, with Hoffman as Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein opposite Robert Redford's Bob Woodward. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it a spellbinding detective story. Author James Morrison pointed out the link to Lenny: Hoffman went from playing a martyr to establishment oppression to playing a reporter exposing presidential malfeasance.

  For Marathon Man, also in 1976, Hoffman played Babe Levy, a graduate student and part-time long-distance runner pursued by a fugitive Nazi. To feel like a man under severe stress, he went without sleep for days at a time and let his body go. Laurence Olivier was alarmed when Hoffman arrived on set for the dental torture scene. After hearing what Hoffman had done, Olivier replied, "My dear boy, have you ever tried simply acting? It's much easier."

  Rain Man, directed by Barry Levinson, took Hoffman two years of work with Levinson and Tom Cruise. Hoffman spent those years befriending autistic people, taking them bowling and to fast food restaurants. At 21, he had worked at the New York Psychiatric Institute, and he drew on that experience. For Raymond Babbitt, critic David Denby noted a small shuffling walk, a bent shoulder, averted eyes and a flat, nasal bark of a voice. The performance won Hoffman his second Academy Award, and the film took four Oscars including Best Picture.

  "Deep inside, Rain Man is about how autistic we all are," Hoffman has said.

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• 5. Fathers and Salesmen

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  Kramer vs. Kramer, released in 1979, put Hoffman opposite Meryl Streep under director Robert Benton. His character, an advertising art director, is left alone with his six-year-old son Billy after his wife walks out. Hoffman was going through his own divorce at the time, after a ten-year first marriage.

  The role touched something personal. "I got closer to being a father by playing a father. That's very painful to say," he told an interviewer. He praised Benton for pulling emotion out of him when he felt he had nothing left. The film won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, Streep took Best Supporting Actress, and Hoffman collected his first Academy Award.

  Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman had hit Hoffman much earlier. He first read it at 16 and described feeling destroyed, as if his family's privacy had been invaded. "It was a blueprint of my family. I was the loser, the flunky, and my brother, a high-school varsity football player, was Biff," he said. For years, writer Marie Brenner noted, he was obsessed with playing Willy Loman. Once he learned that Miller was his neighbor in Connecticut, the two began talking about it seriously.

  He had watched Lee J. Cobb in the original and remembered his sixteen-inch guns on that stage. Brenner wrote that Hoffman trained like a boxer for a part that wore Cobb out so badly he was replaced after four months. Hoffman called the original director, Elia Kazan, the best who ever lived.

  Hoffman played Willy Loman in the Broadway revival in 1984 and repeated the role in a television film. It won him the 1985 Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor, and a Golden Globe as well. Four years later he took on Shylock in Peter Hall's production of The Merchant of Venice at the Phoenix Theatre in London. It moved to New York the next year and brought him a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play.

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• 6. Fights and Failures

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  William Goldman wrote both the novel and the screenplay for Marathon Man, and he and Hoffman clashed over its final scene. The script required Hoffman's character to shoot Olivier's Dr. Szell dead at point-blank range. Hoffman said he could not do it. By his account it turned ugly, and he told Goldman to hire someone else.

  Hoffman recalled that Goldman asked, "Are you such a Jew?" His answer stuck with him: "I won't play a Jew who cold-bloodedly kills another human being." He went on to say that being a Jew does not mean losing your humanity or your soul.

  The making of Tootsie in 1982 brought another kind of struggle. Hoffman played Michael Dorsey, an unemployed actor who dresses as a woman to win a soap opera role, with Jessica Lange as co-star and Sydney Pollack directing. The film earned ten Academy Award nominations, including Hoffman's fifth. Hoffman, who likes to be well prepared, was promised two weeks of rehearsal and did not get them. Filming also began with the screenplay unfinished.

  Gary Oldman reported that Hoffman once told him of making comments to a very powerful industry figure, who then made sure Hoffman could not find work in Hollywood for a time after Tootsie.

  In 1983 Hoffman signed on to The Yellow Jersey, a bicycle-racing drama set around the Tour de France. He cared deeply about the project and first brought in Michael Cimino as director. He later fired Cimino over his uncompromising way of working. The producers never found a replacement, and the film was never made.

  Ishtar, in 1987, became his worst failure. Elaine May directed, and Warren Beatty co-starred and produced. The two played down-and-out singer-songwriters who get caught up in intrigue in Morocco. Production problems plagued the film, which cost $55 million and received overwhelmingly negative reviews. Hoffman and Beatty liked the final cut and defended it. In time the film became a cult favorite, and Quentin Tarantino has named it among his favorite movies, partly for the funny lyrics Paul Williams wrote for its songs.

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• 7. A Second Act

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  In 1991 Hoffman voiced the substitute teacher Mr. Bergstrom in The Simpsons episode "Lisa's Substitute". He was credited as Sam Etic, a play on the word Semitic. That same year he played Captain Hook in Steven Spielberg's Hook, and the costume was so heavy that he wore an air-conditioned suit beneath it. The role earned him a Golden Globe nomination.

  In Outbreak, from 1995, Hoffman played an Army colonel and doctor at USAMRIID who races to stop a deadly Ebola-like virus brought to the United States by an infected monkey. Punch Productions, his own production company, helped produce it. David Denby wrote that he was tense, edgy and righteous, like a B-movie actor from the fifties.

  Wag the Dog, in 1997, earned Hoffman his seventh Academy Award nomination. Barry Levinson directed this black comedy, in which a Washington spin doctor played by Robert De Niro hires a Hollywood producer, played by Hoffman, to invent a war with Albania and bury a sex scandal before a presidential election. Some viewed the producer as a caricature of Robert Evans. Critic Janet Maslin noted that he conducts business meetings in tennis clothes or in robe and slippers.

  The American Film Institute gave Hoffman its 27th Life Achievement Award in 1999, with Jack Nicholson presenting. Hoffman quoted Emily Dickinson: "Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open the door." A reel of his many roles at the ceremony brought on a panic attack, followed by depression. It traced back, he said, to a core feeling: "I never felt I deserved success."

  The new century brought mostly supporting roles. He played the theater owner Charles Frohman in Finding Neverland in 2004 and an existential detective in I Heart Huckabees the same year. Also in 2004, he joined De Niro, Streisand and Ben Stiller in Meet the Fockers, which won him an MTV Movie Award for Best Comedic Performance.

  In 2008 he voiced Shifu in Kung Fu Panda, despite his reluctance to do animation. He tutored co-star Jack Black in acting for a pivotal scene and won an Annie Award for the role. He returned to the franchise through Kung Fu Panda 4 in 2024.

  Quartet, in 2012, marked his directorial debut, with Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins, Billy Connolly and Michael Gambon. It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival that year, and Smith earned a Golden Globe nomination. That same year HBO canceled his horse racing series Luck after a single season, following the deaths of three horses on set. Later honors included the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012, and The Meyerowitz Stories earned a four-minute standing ovation at Cannes on the 21st of May 2017.

  In 2020 it was announced that he would return to Broadway as the Stage Manager in Scott Rudin's revival of Our Town. His last stage appearance had come thirty years earlier, in The Merchant of Venice. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Broadway theaters stayed closed until 2021. In 2024 Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis premiered at Cannes, reuniting Hoffman with his Midnight Cowboy co-star Jon Voight.

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• 8. Life Off Screen

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  Hoffman met Anne Byrne in 1963 and married her in May 1969. He adopted her child Karina, born in 1967, and the couple had a daughter, Jenna, on the 15th of October 1969. In 1970 they lived in Greenwich Village next door to a townhouse occupied by members of the Weathermen. A bomb accidentally went off in its basement and killed three people. Hoffman can be seen standing in the street afterward in the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground. He and Byrne divorced in 1980.

  Lisa Gottsegen, whose family had known his while they were growing up, was finishing her law degree when Hoffman began seeing her. They married on the 12th of October 1980 and have four children: Jacob, Rebecca, Maxwell and Alexandra, known as Ali. They were born between 1981 and 1987. All four had bar or bat mitzvahs, and Hoffman says he is more observant now than when he was young. He regrets that he is not fluent in Hebrew.

  Hoffman has long supported the Democratic Party and Ralph Nader. In 1997 he signed an open letter to German chancellor Helmut Kohl, protesting the treatment of Scientologists in Germany, which ran as a newspaper advertisement in the International Herald Tribune. He was treated successfully for cancer in 2013.

  In 2017 seven women accused Hoffman of sexual misconduct or assault. Anna Graham Hunter said that at 17, while interning on a television production of Death of a Salesman, she endured inappropriate jokes and comments and was asked to give him foot massages. Hoffman apologized, saying he felt terrible that anything he did could have made her uncomfortable. Slate also reported differences between Hoffman and Meryl Streep, including a slap in a scene and an incident of groping. Streep's representative said the report was not an accurate rendering of their 1979 meeting. The representative added that there was an offense, that Hoffman apologized, and that Streep accepted it.

  In December 2017, at the 20th anniversary screening of Wag the Dog at the 92nd Street Y, John Oliver pressed Hoffman about the allegations. Oliver said that a statement that the accusation was not reflective of who Hoffman is felt like a dismissal. Hoffman said he felt blindsided and that the accusations were not true. He has not publicly responded to the other six allegations.

  Bill Murray, who worked with Hoffman on Tootsie and The Lost City, defended him. He described Hoffman as a Borscht Belt flirt his whole life and "a really sweet man." Chevy Chase and Liam Neeson also spoke up for him.

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