Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman is an actor, born 1937.
Dustin Hoffman was born in Los Angeles in 1937 and changed what an American leading man was allowed to look like. He was thirty when The Graduate came out in 1967, playing twenty-one, small and nasal and visibly uncomfortable, and the film's success made a generation of unconventional actors bankable. He is one of the central figures of New Hollywood for that reason as much as for any single performance.
His method is transformation, and he takes it further than almost anyone of his era. Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, two years after The Graduate, is a complete physical rebuild, limp and wheeze and all. Rain Man required him to play autism as a set of unbreakable rules rather than a sentiment, and it is the harder and less showy half of that film. Tootsie is the best comic performance of his career and possibly the smartest, because he plays a man discovering that he is a nicer person in a dress and does not let the character enjoy the lesson. He has two Academy Awards, four British Academy Film Awards, five Golden Globes and two Emmys, plus a Tony nomination.
The seventies run is the spine, Little Big Man, Straw Dogs, Papillon, All the President's Men, Marathon Man, and after Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man the choices get looser. There is broad studio comedy, Meet the Fockers and its sequel, and there is genuinely fine late work: the producer in Wag the Dog, the theatre impresario in Finding Neverland, a difficult sculptor father in The Meyerowitz Stories. He voiced Master Shifu across four Kung Fu Panda films, directed Quartet in 2012, and holds the Cecil B. DeMille Award, the AFI Life Achievement Award and Kennedy Center Honors.
Movies (78)
- Tuner (2026)
- Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024)
- Kung Fu Panda (2008)
- Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011)
- Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016)
- Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)
- Sleepers (1996)
- Hook (1991)
- Outbreak (1995)
- The Graduate (1967)
- Meet the Fockers (2004)
- Marathon Man (1976)
- Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)
- Megalopolis (2024)
- Rain Man (1988)
- Chef (2014)
- Little Fockers (2010)
- The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999)
- Midnight Cowboy (1969)
- Papillon (1973)
- Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Furious Five (2008)
- The Cobbler (2014)
- Runaway Jury (2003)
- Racing Stripes (2005)
- Sphere (1998)
- Dick Tracy (1990)
- All the President's Men (1976)
- Hero (1992)
- Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
- Straw Dogs (1971)
TV (11)
Where to start with Dustin Hoffman
Take The Graduate first. It is the historically important one and remains startling, mostly because the film is far colder about its hero than its reputation as a romance suggests. Then watch Midnight Cowboy straight after, because seeing those two performances two years apart is the fastest way to understand what he was doing to American screen acting.
Tootsie is the one to watch for pleasure, a comedy that is genuinely about something and gives him his best writing. Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man are the Oscar films, and of the two the second has aged less comfortably and the first much better than expected.
For the seventies, All the President's Men is the ensemble piece where he plays reporting as boring, patient work, which is why it holds up. And The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is the late-career one people miss, a prickly, funny performance with no vanity in it at all.
The New Hollywood decade
Roughly ten years in which he is in a startling proportion of the films that decade is remembered for. The Graduate made him a star at thirty playing a graduate, and Midnight Cowboy immediately proved it was not a fluke.
The award performances
Two Academy Awards and a run of nominations around them. Tootsie is the one to watch: a comedy built on him being unbearable, and a performance he has said taught him something he did not enjoy learning.
The voice and family work
Four Kung Fu Panda films as Shifu plus a run of children's pictures, which is a substantial late career on its own. He plays Shifu with real exasperation, which is why the films work.
The late character parts
Smaller, stranger roles in the last two decades, mostly for directors who grew up on the seventies work. The Meyerowitz Stories is the best of them and among the best things he has ever done.
Dustin Hoffman on CrossBinge
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