Deutsche Welle has published a look back at Dustin Hoffman’s career as the charismatic actor becomes 80.
Although many aspiring actors move to Los Angeles hoping to make it big, Dustin Hoffman, who was born there on August 8, 1937, preferred to move to New York City at the age of 20 to find acting gigs.
Sharing an apartment with Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman, he picked up odd jobs while trying to build his career on Broadway and studying at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, which led him to become a dedicated method actor.
After Hoffman’s film debut in “The Tiger Makes Out” in 1967, his breakthrough role came later that same year.
Filmmaker Mike Nichols cast him as the lead character in “The Graduate”. The film, featuring great songs by Simon and Garfunkel, turned out to be an unexpected box office hit, and 50 years later, it remains a classic.
Hoffman didn’t expect to become a superstar so quickly either. “The truth of it is that I got a lot of crappy parts offered to me and I didn’t want to make movies anymore; I wanted to go back to the theater,” he once told The Guardian.
A completely different character, the seedy conman Ratso Rizzo in “Midnight Cowboy,” was attractive enough to make him come back to acting in movies in 1969. This other cult movie established Hoffman’s reputation as a versatile actor.
He’s since tackled practically all genres over the last five decades of his career and has won numerous awards, including two Oscars and five additional nominations for best actor.
Though his most notable work was done from the 1960s through the 1980s, his over-60-movie filmography is simply too broad to mention all of his successful roles.
The actor also directed his first film in 2012, “Quartet,” which received positive reviews.
Successfully treated for cancer a year later, Hoffman did not retire from acting afterwards.
This year, he was at the Cannes Film Festival to promote his latest film, “The Meyerowitz Stories,” where he plays a forgotten abstract artist with a dysfunctional family. The Netflix production will be released later this year.
The celebrated actor is also the voice of Master Shifu in the “Kung Fu Panda” films. The scriptwriters of the animated martial arts comedies were probably inspired by the challenging diversity of Hoffman’s roles when they made his character say, “If you only do what you can do, you’ll never be better than what you are.”
To note, for the Armenian spectator the most famous starring roles of Hoffman are the ones in «Kramer vs Kramer», «Rain Man» and Sydney Pollack’s «Tootsie».
