Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Lee Hoffman is an American actor and filmmaker. As one of the key actors in the formation of New Hollywood, Hoffman is known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and emotionally vulnerable characters. Among his numerous accolades are two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards as well as a nomination for a Tony Award. He was honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1997, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1999, and the Kennedy Center Honors Award in 2012.
Hoffman studied at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music before he decided to go into acting, for which he trained at the Pasadena Playhouse. He made his film debut with the black comedy The Tiger Makes Out. He went on to receive two Academy Awards for Best Actor playing a man going through a divorce in Kramer vs. Kramer and an autistic savant in Rain Man. He was Oscar-nominated for The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Lenny, Tootsie, and Wag the Dog. Other notable roles include in Little Big Man, Papillon, Marathon Man, All the President's Men, Ishtar, Dick Tracy, and Hook.
In the 21st century, he acted in films such as Finding Neverland, I Heart Huckabees, and Stranger than Fiction, as well as Meet the Fockers and its sequel Little Fockers, The Meyerowitz Stories, and Megalopolis. Hoffman has voiced roles in The Tale of Despereaux and the Kung Fu Panda film series. In 2012, he made his directorial debut with Quartet.
Hoffman made his Broadway debut in the 1961 play A Cook for Mr. General. He subsequently starred as Willy Loman in the 1984 revival of Death of a Salesman and reprised the role a year later in a television film, earning a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Actor in a Limited Series or Movie. In 1989, he received a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play nomination for his role as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. He has received three Drama Desk Awards, for his performances in Eh?, Jimmy Shine, and Death of a Salesman, respectively.
Early life and education
Dustin Lee Hoffman was born on August 8, 1937, in Los Angeles, California, the younger of two sons of Harry Hoffman and Lillian. His father worked as a prop supervisor at Columbia Pictures before becoming a furniture salesman.Hoffman was named after stage and silent screen actor Dustin Farnum. He has an elder brother Ronald, who is a lawyer and economist. Hoffman is Jewish, from an Ashkenazi Jewish family of immigrants from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Iași, Romania. The family's surname was spelled Гойхман in Ukraine.
His upbringing was nonreligious, and he has said, "I don't have any memory of celebrating holidays growing up that were Jewish", and that he had "realized" he was Jewish at around the age of 10.
Hoffman graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1955 and enrolled at Santa Monica College with the intention of studying medicine. But he decided to become an actor, and left in the following year to join the Pasadena Playhouse, although when he told his family about his career goal, his Aunt Pearl warned him, "You can't be an actor. You are not good-looking enough." He also studied with Lee Strasberg and has stated that he did not study with either Sanford Meisner or Stella Adler.
Hoffman initially hoped to become a classical pianist, having studied piano during much of his youth and in college. While at Santa Monica College, he also took an acting class, which he assumed would be easy, and "caught the acting bug". He recalls: "I just was not gifted in music. I did not have an ear." Now an aspiring actor, he spent the next 10 years doing odd jobs, being unemployed, and struggling to get any available acting roles, a lifestyle he was later to portray in the comedy film Tootsie. Hoffman composed a song called "Shooting the Breeze", alongside Bette Midler who wrote the words.
Film career
1960–1966: Early theatre roles
Hoffman's first acting role was at the Pasadena Playhouse, alongside future Academy Award–winner Gene Hackman. After two years there, Hackman headed for New York City, with Hoffman soon following. Hoffman, Hackman, and Robert Duvall lived together in the 1960s, whilst all three of them focused on finding acting jobs. Hackman remembers, "The idea that any of us would do well in films simply didn't occur to us. We just wanted to work". Hoffman's appearance—Duvall described him as Barbra Streisand in drag—and small size made him uncastable, Vanity Fair later wrote. During this period, Hoffman got occasional television bit parts, including commercials but, needing income, he briefly left acting in order to teach.Hoffman then studied at Actors Studio and became a dedicated method actor. In 1960 Hoffman was cast in a role in an off-Broadway production and followed with a bit part in his Broadway debut in production, A Cook for Mr. General. In 1962, he appeared in Rabbit Run Theatre's summer stock production of Write Me a Murder in Madison, Ohio and served as an assistant director to Ulu Grosbard on The Days and Nights of BeeBee Fenstermaker at off-Broadway's Sheridan Square Playhouse. In 1964, Hoffman appeared in Three Men on a Horse at Princeton's McCarter Theatre and in 1965, in off-Broadway's Harry, Noon and Night with Joel Grey. On June 23, 1965, he played Mendy in a practice run of Philip Roth's abandoned off-Broadway play The Nice Jewish Boy, directed by Gene Saks and co-starring Melinda Dillon. Grosbard and Hoffman reunited for a 1965 recording of Death of a Salesman starring Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock, with Hoffman playing Bernard. He was assistant director for Grosbard's 1965 off-Broadway production of A View from the Bridge starring Robert Duvall and Jon Voight, and in late 1965 stage-managed and appeared in Grosbard's The Subject Was Roses on Broadway. Hoffman's "sharply outlined and vividly colored" performance in off-Broadway's The Journey of the Fifth Horse in April 1966 was followed by another critical success in the play Eh?, by Henry Livings, which had its U.S. premiere at the Circle in the Square Theatre on October 16, 1966. Sidney W. Pink, a producer and 3D-movie pioneer, discovered Hoffman in one of his off-Broadway roles and cast him in Madigan's Millions. Through the early and mid-1960s, Hoffman made appearances in television shows and movies, including Naked City, The Defenders and Hallmark Hall of Fame.
Hoffman starred in the 1966 off-Broadway play Eh?, for which he received a Drama Desk Award. He made his film debut in The Tiger Makes Out in 1967, alongside Eli Wallach. In 1967, immediately after wrapping up principal filming on The Tiger Makes Out, Hoffman flew from New York City to Fargo, North Dakota, where he directed productions of William Gibson's Two for the Seesaw and William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life for the Fargo-Moorhead Community Theatre. The $1,000 he received for the eight-week contract was all he had to hold him over until the funds from the movie materialized.
1967–1969: ''The Graduate'' and breakthrough
Director Mike Nichols auditioned Hoffman in 1966 for a lead role in the Broadway musical The Apple Tree but rejected him because he could not sing well enough, and gave Alan Alda the part. However, Nichols was so impressed with Hoffman's overall audition that he cast him as the male lead in the movie The Graduate. This role was that of Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate who has an affair with Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's law partner. It was Hoffman's first major role; he received an Academy Award nomination for it, but lost to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night.Although Life magazine joked that "if Dustin Hoffman's face were his fortune, he'd be committed to a life of poverty", The Graduate was a gigantic box office hit for Embassy Pictures, making Hoffman a major new star at the same time. The film received near-unanimous good reviews. Time magazine called Hoffman "a symbol of youth" who represented "a new breed of actors". The film's screenwriter, Buck Henry, notes that Hoffman's character made conventional good looks no longer necessary on screen, "A whole generation changed its idea of what guys should look like. ... I think Dustin's physical being brought a sort of social and visual change, in the same way people first thought of Bogart. They called him ugly". Hoffman's success amazed friends from his early years as an actor, who told him "You were the last one I expected to make it". Biographer Jeff Lenburg wrote that "newspapers across the country were deluged with thousands of letters from fans", with one example published in The New York Times: "I identified with Ben. ... I thought of him as a spiritual brother. He was confused about his future and about his place in the world, as I am. It's a film one digs, rather than understands intellectually".
Turner Classic Movies critic Rob Nixon notes that Hoffman represented "a new generation of actors". He credits Hoffman with breaking "the mold of the traditional movie star and brought to their roles a new candor, ethnicity, and eagerness to dive deep into complex, even unlikable characters." Nixon expands on the significance of the film to Hoffman's career: "In The Graduate, he created a lasting resonance as Ben Braddock that made him an overnight sensation and set him on the road to becoming one of our biggest stars and most respected actors." Hoffman, however, mostly credits director Mike Nichols for taking a great risk in giving him, a relative unknown, the starring role: "I don't know of another instance of a director at the height of his powers who would take a chance and cast someone like me in that part. It took tremendous courage."
Critic Sam Kashner observed strong similarities between Hoffman's character and that of Nichols when he previously acted with Elaine May in the comedy team of Nichols and May. "Just close your eyes and you'll hear a Mike Nichols—Elaine May routine in any number of scenes." Buck Henry also noticed that "Dustin picked up all these Nichols habits, which he used in the character. Those little noises he makes are straight from Mike", he says. After completing The Graduate Hoffman turned down most of the film roles offered to him, preferring to go back to New York and continue performing in live theater. He returned to Broadway to appear in the title role of the musical Jimmy Shine. Hoffman won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance. "I was a theater person. That's how my friends were, too, Gene Hackman and Bobby Duvall. I wasn't going to be a movie star. I wasn't going to sell out. We wanted to be really good actors. I told them, "I'm going out to make this movie. Don't worry, I'm coming right back."
Hoffman was paid $20,000 for his role in The Graduate, but netted just $4,000 after taxes and living expenses. After spending that money, Hoffman filed for New York State unemployment benefits, receiving $55 per week while living in a two-room apartment in the West Village of Manhattan. He was then offered the lead in Midnight Cowboy, which he accepted partly to prove many critics were wrong about his acting range and the variety of characters he could portray. Peter Biskind wrote, "it was the very contrast between his preppy character in The Graduate, and Ratso Rizzo" that appealed to Hoffman. 'I had become troubled,' recalls Hoffman, 'by the reviews that I read of The Graduate, that I was not a character actor, which I like to think of myself as. It hurt me. Some of the stuff in the press was brutal.'" Critics assumed that director Mike Nichols got lucky by finding a typical actor with average acting ability to play the part of Benjamin Braddock.
John Schlesinger, who would direct Midnight Cowboy and was seeking lead actors, held that same impression. Hoffman's performance as a button-down college graduate and track star was so convincing to Schlesinger, "he seemed unable to comprehend the fact that he was acting", notes Biskind. To help the director, whom he had never met, overcome that false impression, Hoffman met him in Times Square dressed as a homeless person, wearing a dirty raincoat, his hair slicked back and with an unshaven face. Schlesinger was sold, admitting, "I've only seen you in the context of The Graduate, but you'll do quite well." Midnight Cowboy premiered in theaters across the United States in May 1969. For his acting, Hoffman received his second Oscar nomination and the film won Best Picture. In 1994 the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Biskind considers Hoffman's acting a major accomplishment:
File:Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow - John and Mary.jpg|thumb|170px|left|Hoffman with Mia Farrow on the set of John and Mary
Also in 1969, Hoffman co-starred with Mia Farrow in the Peter Yates's romantic drama film John and Mary. He received a 1970 British Academy Film Award for Best Actor for his performance in the film, although the film received mixed reviews. He was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy Motion Picture The film was made soon after the success of Farrow's performance in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, and Hoffman's performance in The Graduate, which prompted their being hailed on the cover of the February 27, 1969, Time magazine as stars of their generation.