Dustin Hoffman won his big break in The Graduate in 1967. Now 75 and a winner of two Oscars, five Golden Globes and four BAFTAs, he talks about his career.
“I don’t love my first wife. I haven’t for years. My wife is here, and she’s going to say: ‘Why are you crying about your first wife?’ But life stays with you. You don’t shed the pain of it completely.”
Dustin Hoffman is on stage at London’s famous Princess Anne Theatre, home of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. His audience is utterly silent, spellbound by what they are witnessing. His voice is cracking with emotion. His eyes are welling with tears. And he is not acting.
Hoffman is famed for being a perfectionist, a method actor who is prepared to go to extremes to immerse himself in a role. The side he is showing now is less well known.
Both qualities are emerging in the course of a retrospective view of his career at an event organised by BAFTA and sponsored by Deutsche Bank.
He is looking back on clips from his distinguished film catalogue, talking about Kramer vs Kramer, the film charting the aftermath of a failed marriage, which won him his first Oscar.
He originally turned down the part because he didn’t like the script. “It was a low point in my life. I was getting a divorce from my first wife. I was struggling. It was the ’70s. I had partied with drugs, and it had left me depleted. I said: ‘This script is just not touching any of the realities that I’m feeling.’”
Like refusing roles, unhappiness with a script is a recurring theme in Hoffman’s career. His discomfort persuaded director Robert Benton to spend three months in a hotel room with him while the pair completely rewrote the script.
The film went on to win huge critical acclaim. Hoffman says that by tapping into his own raw experiences and emotions he was able to give it a meaningful spine, which made it both therapeutic and painful to shoot.
“People don’t split up from relationships because they suddenly stop loving each other. They wish they could. But real love doesn’t snap off like the branch of a tree. You split up because – for whatever reason – you cannot inhabit the same space. It’s intolerable for both.”
As he reflects on the film’s core message, he breaks down. “There’s nothing… sorry… there’s nothing worse than having to go through the pain of not being able to separate yourself from an experience because the love at the time is holding you.”
He starts laughing as he tries to explain his tears to an audience moved and surprised by the sincerity of his emotion.
Dustin Hoffman at the Deutsche Bank ‘BAFTA: A life in pictures – Dustin Hoffman’ event in October this year