Dustin Hoffman was born in Los Angeles in 1937. His father had worked for a short time as a prop builder on film sets but was fired and became a furniture salesman. Hoffman took up acting only because he was so bad at every other subject at school. “I was failing, and a friend of mine said: ‘Well, take acting.’ I said I wasn’t interested in it. He said: ‘But it’s three credits – and you don’t fail acting!’ So I took it, and it was the only subject I ever had where I didn’t look at my watch. I could rehearse all day – it just felt the time went by. I didn’t think I was a good actor. I just felt this was something I could do without agonising.”
He went on to train at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he met Gene Hackman. “Gene was kicked out after three months for not having any talent – that’s what they told him!” On graduating Hoffman joined Hackman in New York, where the two shared an apartment with a third future Oscar winner, Robert Duvall. “I began waiting tables, Bob worked midnight-to- eight at a post office, and Gene moved furniture up and down the tenements. And that’s what we did for 10 years.”
His break came with an acclaimed stage hit, Eh!. He was spotted and invited to audition for the part of Benjamin Braddock in the film The Graduate, but initially he refused the opportunity. He says: “It was a different time. It was the Beat Generation time. There was great dignity in being unemployed, and if you took a job that was a commercial or soap opera you didn’t tell anybody – you were selling out no matter what job was offered you. So I turned down the audition. I said I didn’t think I was right for the part. It was written for Paul Newman – six feet tall, blonde hair and blue eyes.” He smiles at the audience’s incredulity. “I was arrogant. We were all arrogant. It was all we had to live on!”
The Graduate earned Hoffman an Academy Award nomination and opened the door to roles in some of the best-loved films of the past four decades: Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, Papillon, All the President’s Men, Kramer vs Kramer, Tootsie, Rain Man, Hook and Meet the Fockers.
Hoffman’s style of acting requires him to make an emotional connection with the character he is playing. A lifetime of
tapping into feelings others would rather lay buried perhaps explains his tearful inability to block the channel to those emotions today. For the part of down-and- out Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy he exploited his own experiences of low self-esteem.
“Midnight Cowboy was relatively easy for me, because it was quite frankly what I felt about myself. I felt I was the ugly kid on the block. I was an outcast at school. I wasn’t in any clubs, I was always on the periphery, and I had a bad case of acne – I don’t even know what a good case of acne is! I was the shortest kid in class. It was a miserable experience for me – all of school. Ratso was an interior feeling, so I didn’t have to chase after it too much.”
Hoffman is legendary for his preparation for roles. In Tootsie – which he co-wrote – he satirised himself by playing the part of a failed actor who goes to obsessive lengths in his quest to become a convincing-looking woman.
Hoffman put a huge effort into getting the costume and make-up right. “I didn’t want an audience to think that if they saw me walking down the street in real life they’d
say: ‘Who’s that guy in drag?’ I wanted to be a woman.” He starts laughing again: “I went to my daughter’s school – my daughter’s now 42, and she was eight then – and she said: ‘Dad get out of here!’ I was dressed up. I said: ‘Introduce me to your teacher.’ My daughter’s been in therapy ever since, but I did want to get away with it!”
On another occasion, during filming in a restaurant, he bumped into Jon Voight, his Midnight Cowboy co-star, and, dressed in the character of Dorothy Michaels, managed to speak to his old friend without being rumbled.
To get the voice right he worked with a speech therapist from UCLA, learning to talk softly to avoid speaking in a falsetto. The speech therapist encouraged him to end every sentence in a question mark. “She was extraordinary. She said: ‘If you’ll notice, women are still asking for permission to be in a man’s world.’ I said: ‘What do you mean by that?’ She said: ‘Well, men tend to say: ‘Let me tell you what I think!’” Hoffman sits on the edge of the chair, aggressively waving what he calls a ‘phallic finger’. “‘Whether implicitly or explicitly, women tend to say: ‘May I say