TALES
OF
HOFFMAN
THE GRADUATE
MIDNIGHT COWBOY
LITTLE BIG MAN
PAPILLON
MARATHON MAN
KRAMER VS.
magazine—by carrying my purse to a small room backstage,
where we will talk. Several times during our chat, he looks
off, crinkles his nose, and says, “That’s a really good question,” and I am reminded of his cheering Hackman along that
winding highway.
He enthuses about his latest movie, Last Chance Harvey,
a romantic comedy in which Hoffman plays a washed-up,
divorced jingle writer who has traveled to London to attend
his daughter’s wedding. His character is estranged from her,
and, seemingly, the rest of the world—until he meets Kate,
played by Emma Thompson. She’s an employee of the Office
of National Statistics, and as much of a lost soul as Harvey.
“In this film,” Hoffman explains, “Emma and I said, ‘What
if we play as close to ourselves as we can?’ In other words,
‘Do not play. Just be yourself.’ ”
Really? Dustin Hoffman, among the most popular of
Hollywood stars, a last-chance Harvey? i have never been a man’s man,” Hoffman confesses. “I go in a restaurant, see that long table of men with cigars, and I do not understand it. And I have never been a [sports] fan, either. Ultimately I’m for whoever the underdog is.” Hoffman’s identification with the underdog explains a lot about him: he always thought of him-
self as the quintessential black sheep. The son of a pianist and
a Columbia Studios prop man turned furniture salesman, he
endured what he describes as a loveless upbringing. “I really
think my brother and I grew up in a house with two people
who should not have had children,” Hoffman says. He read
his first play, Death of a Salesman, at age 16 and now says, “It
was a blueprint of my family. I was the loser, the flunky, and
my brother, a high-school varsity football player, was Biff.”
Though he studied piano and plays beautifully to this day,
Hoffman made a fateful decision. “I just was not gifted. I did
not have an ear.” At Santa Monica College he took an acting
class to get an easy passing grade—he says he had always had
difficulty focusing and was on the verge of flunking out—and
caught the acting bug. For the next ten years he struggled for
acting work, and he was far from surprised when he didn’t hit
the big time just out of the gate. “I was a peripheral person,”
he explains. “I was never invited to the parties. I did not go to
the prom. So I was certainly comfortable as an actor hanging
out with people that were also unemployed and struggling.”
Hoffman landed in New York, where he intermittently
lived with pals Hackman and Robert Duvall. To pay the bills,
he waited tables and worked odd jobs. “Dusty and I shared a
certain joy in going to auditions,” Hackman remembers. “The
idea that either of us would do well in films simply didn’t
occur to us. We just wanted to work.”
“Then suddenly this freak accident happened,” Hoffman
says. When the still-struggling actor was 29, director Mike
Nichols cast him as an angst-driven 21-year-old who was
having an affair with a friend of his parents. His title role in
1967’s The Graduate changed Dustin Hoffman’s life.
From the start, he viewed the celebrity part of acting as a
compromise. After The Graduate, Hoffman briefly went on
the presidential campaign trail for Eugene McCarthy, visit-
ing college campuses around the country. “The students
would be kind of looking at me in awe,” he remembers. “I
would say, ‘I’m 30, and I’m not anything like that character.’
It was like saying, ‘Do not look at me as a movie star.’ ”
He told his friends he’d never do another movie, that he
was going back to the theater. Then he read the script for
Midnight Cowboy and changed his mind. Against the advice of
Hollywood colleagues, he took a supporting role in the movie
as the consumptive street con Ratso Rizzo—beginning a
string of memorable parts in such landmark films as Little Big
Man, Lenny, All the President’s Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, and
Rain Man. He won Best Actor Oscars for the last two, after
having been nominated seven times. One of those nomina-
tions was for his turn in Tootsie, as actress Dorothy Michaels
(the female alter ego of Michael Dorsey), a character he
holds a special fondness for and who he is said to have mod-
eled after his mother. “In a sense,” says Hoffman, “you try to
be autobiographical with your work if you can. In my mind’s
eye I would have done what Dorothy did. She loved her work
and did not want fame.”
But Hoffman himself wasn’t able to avoid it. Film audiences
adored him. Hackman encapsulates his friend’s popular
appeal this way: “People see in Dustin possibilities: the little
guy who can represent the way they feel in a variety of situa-
tions.” Emma Thompson says his strength lies in being true
to who he is. “So many actors make you think of other actors,
but Dustin is completely original. He doesn’t make you think
of anyone but Dustin.”
He also worked extremely hard and gained a deserved
reputation for being exacting; at times, difficult. Still today,
Last Chance Harvey writer-director Joel Hopkins says, the
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