DUSTIN HOFFMAN
AS THE OSCAR WINNER CELEBRATES A MILESTONE, FRIENDS SHARE MEMORIES OF A TRUE MARATHON MAN
From “failing at everything” to superstardom, the legend reveals what he’s learned at age 80.
“I’m not going to determine what I do based on what I fear other people might think.”
— Dustin
Dustin Hoffman wasn’t happy one day while taking a break from filming The Graduate. “He was complaining about how I was making more money than he was,” William Daniels, who played his father in the 1967 classic, recalls to Closer. “I said, ‘OK, you can have my part and my money, and I’ll take your part and your money.’ He laughed, grumbled a bit, and let it go.”
It’s a good thing he did. The Graduate launched Dustin’s unlikely career as a movie star — and a brilliant, 50-year run that’s still going strong as he marks his 80th birthday on Aug. 8. “I don’t like the fact that I have to get older so fast,” Dustin says. “But I like the fact that I’m aging so well.”
His life hasn’t always gone so smoothly. Growing up in LA as the son of a set decorator, “I failed everything,” he says. “I was considered in my family to be a loser.” While attending junior college, he took a drama class because he heard it was impossible to flunk and was immediately drawn to acting. Still, he struggled in NYC for years, rooming with the similarly underemployed Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall. “I lived below the official American poverty line until I was 31,” he remembers.
The Graduate changed that. Director Mike Nichols fought to cast the 5-foot-6, lessthan-classically handsome Dustin as Benjamin Braddock over the likes of Robert Redford. “Dustin was not the leading man type,” says William. “But this film set him apart and made you look at him differently.”
Suddenly, Dustin stood tall in Hollywood, making unconventional choices like playing scuzzy Ratso Rizzo in 1969’s Midnight Cowboy. “The word on the street was this guy’s a genius,” co-star Jon Voight tells Closer. “And I found out he was.” Echoes co-star Brenda Vaccaro, “Dustin is delightful, charming, magnificent and a very sharing actor.”
His instincts rarely failed him in the ’70s, as he starred in a string of hits like All the President’s Men and Marathon Man and earned Oscar nods for Lenny and Kramer vs. Kramer. Taking home his first best actor statue for the latter, a searing divorce drama, Dustin deadpanned, “I’d like to thank my parents for not practicing birth control.”
As the ’80s began, Dustin’s first marriage, to dancer Anne Byrne — whom he’d wed in 1969 — ended. He adopted Anne’s daughter Karina from a previous marriage and the couple had one child, Jenna, now 46. Dustin quickly married businesswoman Lisa Gottsegen in 1980, and their union has lasted to this day, producing four kids: Jake, 36, Rebecca, 34, Maxwell, 32, and Alexandra, 29. “To have a successful marriage,” Dustin jokes, “a man must, on a fundamental level, be scared s--less of his wife.”
He’s proven fearless at work, however. “He’s always been ready to do unexpected roles — really eccentric parts, like in Rain Man,” David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, tells Closer of Dustin’s second Oscar-winning character, the autistic savant
LITTLE BIG MAN
“Depressed, anxious, sad, frightened? Yes. But I’ve never been
bored.”
— Dustin
brother of Tom Cruise in the 1988 smash. Of another left-field ’80s hit, the cross-dressing farce Tootsie, Thomson notes, “Not a lot of actors of Dustin’s age and type would have been ready to go in drag, but he felt absolutely comfortable doing it.”
As he’s gotten older, Dustin has segued seamlessly into playing supporting roles, like Ben Stiller’s father in Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers. “Many stars don’t want to make that transition — they see it as a sign of symbolic impotence,” Dustin admits. “But I love acting, and I do what I want to do.”
Along the way, he’s inspired generations of actors to pursue their dreams despite the odds. “He really changed people’s understanding of what a leading man could look like,” Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, tells Closer. “So from The Graduate straight into the ’70s, you had a lot more people who didn’t necessarily look like movie stars become movie stars.”
Dustin’s chameleon-like ability to disappear into his parts also made him a role model. “When I saw Dustin in Midnight Cowboy, I was like, ‘Wow, they got a homeless guy to be in a movie!’” Kevin Bacon tells Closer. “Then I saw him in The Graduate and went, ‘Holy s---, that’s the same guy!’ That, to me, is what being an actor is.”
And he’s still doing it. Dustin reteams with Ben Stiller as his sculptor father in The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), a Netflix dysfunctionalfamily dramedy that earned a four-minute standing ovation at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. At first, “I passed on it,” Dustin admits. “I didn’t want to play an old man.” His son Jake finally convinced him to do it.
“It’s a good job playing Dustin Hoffman’s son — I’d like to keep doing it until I’m as old as Dustin,” says Ben. “Everybody wants to act like Dustin. The reality is you can’t do it.”
Yet Dustin keeps trying to get better. “I always feel like it’s never that good — it’s simply a stay of execution,” he says. “If they don’t get me on this one, they’ll get me next time.”
— Bruce Fretts, with reporting by Lanae Brody, Katie Bruno and Ilyssa Panitz