![]() ![]() The acclaim for The Graduate was hardly the end of Hoffman's awkwardness or conviction that he is "ugly", a hangover from his days as the shortest kid in the class at high school in Los Angeles.Īfter The Graduate, Hoffman made the move back to theatre in New York in December 1968 before returning to the big screen. He still looks cool, something he's often managed despite enduring doubts about his ability to pull off roles that required him to be the leading man. The Eighties black mane these days is a plume of grey spikes, and whilst not for a moment looking as though he's tried to stop the clock in the manner Hollywood knows best, he's fit, tanned and it's very difficult to believe he is 75. Though raised in Los Angeles, the deep nasal quintessential New Yorker voice is so distinctive, it's surreal to hear it disassociated from one of his characters. ![]() "And if you've got another fork, we wouldn't say no!" he adds to our waiter. We're having breakfast in Soho in London, where Hoffman has just had the premiere of his directorial debut, Quartet, a bittersweet comedy about performing, set in a home for retired musicians. The trio voiced frustrations about their prospects that, later, partly inspired Tootsie (with Bill Murray as the flatmate to Hoffman's neurotic Michael Dorsey, an actor so desperate for work that he cross-dresses for auditions to double his chances of getting parts). ![]() In New York, with Hackman and, later, Robert Duvall, Hoffman shared tiny apartments that sound not much more lugubrious than the condemned tenement of Ratso Rizzo, whom he played in Midnight Cowboy. After acting school, he and his buddy - one Gene Hackman - were voted by classmates as the "Least Likely To Succeed". His versatility and unconventional appearance wasn't considered an asset before the "new-wave" invasion led by Hoffman and peers. As director Barry Levinson ( Rain Man, Sleepers, Wag The Dog), notes: "You can't just say, 'Oh yeah, this is the Dustin Hoffman role.' Clint Eastwood is playing Clint Eastwood, but for Dustin, his role is all these characters." ![]() From the opening frames - in which he is carried, lockjawed and helpless, into view on the airport walkway, coming home from college - Hoffman has always been both antihero and hero, leading man and character actor, a real-life demonstration of the fact that it really is possible for a film star to do all of these things, often at the same time. Later on, Hoffman recounts, Nichols said it was this very awkwardness that got him his break in The Graduate. At one point we challenged our parents, and said, 'Why did you ever have children?' my father shot back without a pause: 'Don't ask me.' ![]()
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