The Graduate made Dustin Hoffman a global filmstar and yet he hated it for one main reason… he has acne. Of his role as graduate Benjamin Braddock, who is seduced by Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft) the bored wife of his father’s business partner, he says: “After The Graduate, I went back to the theatre in New York, because it was a horrible experience. I was fighting acne.”
Dustin hated the close-ups of his face, adding: “I’ve had lifelong acne, literally. I mean, I take Accutane [acne treatment] three times a week, or else I’d look like a 15-year-old. I’m 89 and I still have, you know, lifelong acne.” Now, with more than 70 movies under his belt, in a career spanning 60 years, Dustin has won two best actor Oscars – for Kramer vs Kramer (1979) and Rain Man (1988) and was nominated for The Graduate (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969) Lenny (1974, Tootsie (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997).
He adds: “I was paid $3,000 for The Graduate [worth $30,000 today]. I remember I went back to the unemployment office in New York and, at that time, Life Magazine had taken a photo of me. I was the most famous face in America waiting in the unemployment line to get a $50 cheque, which you could live on. I became this cultural icon, but I just wanted to go back to the theatre.
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“I remember my father saying to me ‘do you know how lucky you are?’ He was right. I mean, what are the odds of someone being in their first film with the best director of all time, at that moment, who was Mike Nichols? To be cast in that, not only is it a hit, but it becomes this phenomenon. What’s the odds? A million to one? Two million?”
Looking back, he jokes that playing a 21-year-old seduced by an older woman, was ‘triggering.’ He says: “In my youth, I was having an affair with a married woman. She thought that once her husband went to sleep, he stayed asleep.
“So there we were, having a festival of sorts, and he walked in with a gun. He pointed it at me and said ‘get out, get out’. When you have a gun pointed at you, you realise, ‘This is it. I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die’. And you will do anything, you know, to avoid getting killed!”
Speaking on the US podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, ahead of the release of his new memoir, Look At Me, on Tuesday, produced with the help of The New Yorker magazine writer, Ariel Levy, Dustin says working at Macy’s kickstarted his acting career.
He worked in the New York department store alongside his former room-mates, then young aspiring stars – Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall. He remembers: “I sold hockey games. Someone would come by shopping and they would start playing with me. I started to get good at it, and because I’m an actor, I tried to be a retired, hurt, French hockey player. Gene was right there working at adult games also.”
Dustin and Hackman moved to New York seeking fame, after performing at the Pasadena Playhouse in California during the 1950s. Hackman was 27 and Dustin was19. He says: “I did not think I would ever get into acting. I was supposed to be the failure in the family. My brother was a triple-A student, he was an athlete.
“He was asked to be on a major baseball team when he graduated, but chose college because he thought he’d have a longer career. I was the designated failure. I was very comfortable with that. Nobody expected anything from me. I was a very bad student. The worst. Nobody fails acting.”
He certainly hasn’t – although he says he almost walked out of Rain Man, which he starred in alongside Tom Cruise, as he didn’t know how to portray his character, autistic savant Raymond Babbitt. He says: “The first day of shooting we’re looking at a car in a scene. I looked at the daily rushes and said to my wife, ‘I’m quitting. I don’t know what I’m doing’.
“Tom is a really decent human…despite his good looks. But I could not do the scene. We were about to run out of film and the director said ‘just improvise’. So it’s just Tom and I on the hidden camera, and we’re acting away. Then we run out of film. I said, ‘I’m out of here, I cannot play this guy’.”
But, accidentally, Dustin had nailed it. He continues: “Suddenly, the director goes, ‘that’s it. We have it. That’s the guy you were looking for’”.
Disguising himself as a woman for the comedy Tootsie was another massive challenge. He recalls: “I said to Columbia Pictures ‘I do not want to do this unless I can be believable in makeup, hair, as a woman. I don’t want to walk down the street and have people turning in real life and saying, ‘Who’s that guy in drag?’ Finally we found a way.”
While movie bosses were convinced by his performance, his daughter, Jenna – then a teenager – was horrified. Dustin says: “She was in eighth grade at school at the time. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to go there and test it out’. So I went there in costume. I went up to one of her teachers and started talking and I got away with it.
“But Jenna was furious. She came up to me and said, ‘get out of here, Dad, how can you do this to me?’ She recognised me!”
Turning back to earlier days, he remembers taking the part of Ratso Rizzo, an impoverished small-time conman, in Midnight Cowboy (1969) – a small part, considering his massive profile after The Graduate. He says: “Mike Nichols who produced The Graduate calls me up. He says, ‘what are you doing? It’s not even the lead, it’s a supporting part. Why are you trying to destroy? I made you a star.’ I didn’t want to be a star. I only wanted to do good work.”
Meanwhile, Dustin, at least partly, credits an allergy for his longevity. Recalling the making of Marathon Man (1976) Dustin says: “That was a time when you went to a party and there were lines of coke, you know, on a table. Everybody snorted. I did. Thank God I’m allergic, because I couldn’t breathe after that. I was allergic to it or I wouldn’t be here now.”
Married to businesswoman Lisa Hoffman – having divorced from his first wife, actress and ballerina Anne Byrne, in 1980 – apart from suffering with sniffles and needing to leave himself reminder notes around the house, the father of six is showing few signs of his advancing years.
Sticking to his early philosophy, after The Graduate brought him instant fame, he says: “Even if you become a star you are still you.”
But, despite his own attempts at self-sabotage, when he tried to turn his back on his early fame, Dustin remains a worldwide star. In fact, the only thing he has ever really failed at is being the family failure.
*Dustin Hoffman’s new memoir, Look At Me, published by Simon & Schuster, is out next Tuesday, priced £25.
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