HOW I GRADUATED TO THE BIG TIME IN HOLLYWOOD
It’s 50 years since he was seduced by Mrs Robinson in his first leading role but the Oscar-winner says he still doesn’t know how he beat Robert Redford to the part after his car-crash audition
CLASSIC LOOKS: Robert Redford ally wear fake guns in holsters and practise drawing them fast. They wanted to be in TV westerns and that was their goal.”
When Hackman got kicked out after three months for not having enough talent he moved to New York and Hoffman followed him.
“I slept on his floor and was too scared to go out most of the time because I actually feared being in the city,” he reveals. “Gene figured the only way to get rid of me was to find me a new flatmate. He knew a guy called Robert Duvall. So the three of us, Hackman, Duvall and me, all did day jobs – I was a waiter – and would go for various acting auditions. We would get rejected over and over again for not looking or sounding right.
“We got to the point where we were so scared of rejection we would knock on the door of a casting director, slip our glossy picture under their door and just run.
“I remember those days so clearly and that is the reason I have never taken anything for granted. Once you have failed and been told time and again that you are not good enough, it is very hard to believe the success.”
THE feeling never left any of them, he says. Duvall, 86, who went on to appear in movies such as The Godfather and Tender Mercies, for which he won an Academy Award, has said that “you’re always just a couple of lousy films away from being unemployed again”. Double Oscar-winner Hackman, 87, says: “I think if you’re really interested in acting there is a part of you that relishes the struggle.”
Yet even after decades of success, when Hackman and Hoffman appeared in their first film together, Runaway Jury, the Tootsie star says it felt just like the bad old days.
“I remember we had to shoot a scene in a public lavatory and we both said, ‘This still feels like a dream.’ At any moment we expected to be woken from a coma and be told, ‘None of that good stuff happened. You are both failures.’
“If anyone had told us back in those days that one of us would make it – let alone all three – we would have laughed in their faces.”
But 50 years on the trio still have plenty to laugh about. As Hoffman admits: “Every film is just like my first. I’ve not lost that sense of excitement – or nerves.” The Graduate is re-released next Friday