The year was 1967. An unknown and mostly out-of-work 29-year-old actor named Dustin Lee Hoffman was asked by director Mike Nichols to fly from New York to LA to do a screen test for The Graduate. It was, by all accounts, an unmitigated disaster.
After dropping out of Santa Monica College, he enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse, before later moving to New York to study at the Actors Studio, Lee Strasberg's cradle for Method acting. After long spells out of work, he'd recently started to attract some attention from Broadway and considered himself a stage actor.
The script - and original novel - he'd been sent described a handsome 6' blond overachiever, a Robert Redford essentially, whom Nichols had tested. Plainly, Hoffman wasn't going to get the part. Throughout the screen test he heard discussions between Nichols and the crew about the problem of shooting his nose. Lines were constantly fluffed. At one point, he was screamed at by actress Katharine Ross for trying to reassure her by patting her on the bottom during a love scene. After a tortuous day's shooting, he shook hands, said his goodbyes, and scattered New York subway tokens from his pocket all over the floor. A member of the crew picked them up. "He gave me a hard look in the eye," recalls Hoffman, "and he put them in my hand, and he said, 'Here kid, you're going to need these.'"
Of course, he got the part. Later on, Hoffman recounts, Nichols said it was this very awkwardness that got him his break in The Graduate. From the opening frames - in which he is carried, lockjawed and helpless, into view on the airport walkway, coming home from college - Hoffman has always been both antihero and hero, leading man and character actor, a real-life demonstration of the fact that it really is possible for a film star to do all of these things, often at the same time. As director Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Sleepers, Wag The Dog), notes: "You can't just say, 'Oh yeah, this is the Dustin Hoffman role.' Clint Eastwood is playing Clint Eastwood, but for Dustin, his role is all these characters."
His versatility and unconventional appearance wasn't considered an asset before the "new-wave" invasion led by Hoffman and peers. After acting school, he and his buddy - one Gene Hackman - were voted by classmates as the "Least Likely To Succeed". In New York, with Hackman and, later, Robert Duvall, Hoffman shared tiny apartments that sound not much more lugubrious than the condemned tenement of Ratso Rizzo, whom he played in Midnight Cowboy. The trio voiced frustrations about their prospects that, later, partly inspired Tootsie (with Bill Murray as the flatmate to Hoffman's neurotic Michael Dorsey, an actor so desperate for work that he cross-dresses for auditions to double his chances of getting parts).
Between acting gigs, the young Hoffman worked at Macy's, where he'd explore human behaviour by playing outlandish stunts on customers as a kind of performance art. He once used Gene Hackman's young son Christopher as a prop, pretending he was an uncannily lifelike doll for sale; another time, as a ruse to impress a salesgirl he liked, he persuaded Hackman to pose as a violent and unbalanced customer who needed removing from the store. He even got a job as an orderly in a psychiatric ward, thinking it would give him great material. Remarkably, though, even when The Graduate - a film for which Hoffman would get the first of his seven Best Actor Oscar nominations - was in post-production, its star went back to hopeless audition after hopeless audition.
Nichols, meanwhile, was hardly getting ringing endorsements for his choice of leading man. Friends of the director who were shown the early cuts were baffled by his choice. Recalls Hoffman: "People would come up [to him] and say, 'Great film you could have had, if you didn't miscast the lead!'" Student audiences may have taken the diminutive Benjamin, with his awful Beatles haircut, to heart, but critics were not universally kind. "I remember in print being called a cretin," says Hoffman, part twinkling, part still wounded. "That he [Nichols] miscast it and hired this cretin."
We're having breakfast in Soho in London, where Hoffman has just had the premiere of his directorial debut, Quartet, a bittersweet comedy about performing, set in a home for retired musicians. He orders me a coffee. We share his fruit plate. "And if you've got another fork, we wouldn't say no!" he adds to our waiter. Though raised in Los Angeles, the deep nasal quintessential New Yorker voice is so distinctive, it's surreal to hear it disassociated from one of his characters. The Eighties black mane these days is a plume of grey spikes, and whilst not for a moment looking as though he's tried to stop the clock in the manner Hollywood knows best, he's fit, tanned and it's very difficult to believe he is 75. He still looks cool, something he's often managed despite enduring doubts about his ability to pull off roles that required him to be the leading man. The acclaim for The Graduate was hardly the end of Hoffman's awkwardness or conviction that he is "ugly", a hangover from his days as the shortest kid in the class at high school in Los Angeles.
"You can say it, I'm ugly, I'm ugly!" he says. "I always joke, they'll have the sexiest man in the world or whatever on the cover of People, and I'll say, 'Sorry, honey, never gonna make this cover!' And I never have, because I figure, well, yeah, you've gotta be handsome."
After The Graduate, Hoffman made the move back to theatre in New York in December 1968 before returning to the big screen. His film role was the part of the bum and would-be impresario Ratso Rizzo, the feral foil to Jon Voight's angelic lost soul in John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969). Having made him a leading man, Nichols was dismayed that his next choice was a character role. Hoffman, for his part, has said that he didn't want to conspire in what seemed to be a kind of joke that he could be a leading man. "What you feel about yourself for the first few years of your life never disappears, particularly in the formative years," he maintains today. "You come to terms with it in a certain way, but it's painful. And you can work through that pain. But I think you keep vestiges of all your pain."
Growing up in LA, he went to Los Angeles High School before Santa Monica College. The son of a Ukrainian/Jewish immigrant, doubtless he didn't exactly look like your average California surfer kid. He was tiny ("the shortest guy in the class"), dark, spotty, wore braces, "never good" academically, and the little brother of a brilliant and gifted athlete, Ronald, who later became an economist for the US Treasury. Their childhood was not a happy one. "At one point," says Hoffman. "We challenged our parents, and said, 'Why did you ever have children?' I remember my father shot back without a pause: 'Don't ask me.' My brother's almost seven years older and I'm quite sure I was an accident. I think that defines you more than anything else in your life." Their father, Harry Hoffman, is sometimes, somewhat romantically, described as a set decorator for Columbia Pictures. And whilst it's true that he worked there briefly, in fact, throughout Hoffman's formative years, he worked without much success trying to sell furniture.
Born in 1937, Hoffman was a child of the Great Depression. "We moved around a lot. He was always purchasing a house that he couldn't afford and we'd move in and six months later, he wouldn't have any money for the mortgage and we'd move downtown again," he says. While their mother, Lillian, was more of a "live wire" and had dreamt of running away from the Depression gloom and becoming a showgirl, the idea that she purposefully named her son after silent-movie star Dustin Farnum is another myth added over the years (the truth was, she needed to pick a name quickly in the hospital; she spotted Farnum's name on a movie magazine next to the bed, and so called her son Dustin). Hoffman says it's taken years talking to a good therapist to work through it all.
If his childhood life seemed tough, his adult life has been richly blessed: he's been married to his second wife, Lisa, since 1980 (the absolute height of his fame), and once said that his loved-up hippie character in Meet The Fockers, who can't keep his hands off Barbra Streisand, was based on his marriage. They have four children together, and also raised his daughter and an adopted daughter from his first marriage. This cheerful Brady Bunch-like setup is particularly rare in an industry where dysfunction is the norm.
Hoffman's friend Robert Duvall fondly describes him as "nuts" as a young man. He has mellowed since, but seen in the context of his insecurities, 1982's Tootsie - which he also developed - seems a highly personal film. His character Michael Dorsey's strategy for employment at any cost provides an almost Shakespearean comedy when, as the frumpish Dorothy Michaels, he becomes a minor star of a daytime hospital soap, while falling in love with his unattainably gorgeous co-star (Jessica Lange), whom Hoffman describes today as so beautiful she looked like something out of a fairy story.
It's a film about the unfair bounty of good looks, something that, as a child, Hoffman was taught to equate with happiness ("When my mother got her nose job," he has said, "she wanted me to get one, because she thought I'd be happier"). Seven months of hair and make-up design produced a guise in which Hoffman could pick up his kids from school and pass for a woman, and even fool his friend Jon Voight. (On a visit to the set to see Hoffman, Voight was accosted by an eccentric, fond, older woman whose face he couldn't quite place.) "Once they got the make-up right I said, 'Now, make me beautiful!' They said, 'That's as good as it gets.'"
Hoffman imagined Dorothy - that is, the character his character was playing - in full, including her life beyond the reach of the film, in minute and lonely detail. "I felt I was an interesting woman," he remembers, "but that I would never be able to be attractive to the men that I was attracted to because of my lack of looks." It casts an even more bittersweet note over the scene in which Lange's intimidating beauty does, indeed, meet Michael-as-Michael at a party, but isn't interested.
Former roommate Duvall, however, gives a different perspective. Girls, he says, adored his diminutive flatmate. Indeed, Hoffman has often said he only got into acting in the first place to meet women. "I can't tell you how much. Forget Joe Namath or any of those guys, even before he was a star, he'd have their head in his lap, reading him poetry," recalls Duvall, laughing out loud. "Even before he became well known, he had a thing with women. He had a way." What does Duvall think Hoffman's secret weapon was? "That!" he replies. "Just what you said. He played on: 'Oh, I'm not good looking.’” The ladies, he says, would always protest: "No, you're great!" One memory stands out. "I came downstairs and he had this girl up on the table, nude, pretending he was an artist painting her." Which, of course, is not to say he wasn't also sensitive. Duvall recalls finding a young Hoffman in the street once, "out of it", sitting on the stoop, needing rescuing by his friends, after a breakup.
Hoffman has a soft spot for Tootsie because of what he learned about himself - and his fixation on beauty. "I realised that I grew up with a brainwashed attitude, as most men [do], and that is that a woman has to somehow resemble the cover of a magazine, because they are trophies. I think, how many interesting women did I avoid because of this?"
One of the most striking aspects of Hoffman is the ease with which he can plumb his own emotional life, such as the divorce from his first wife, ballerina and actress Anne Byrne, on which he based Kramer Vs Kramer (1979), or his vexed relationship with his parents.
In the former, for which Hoffman won his first Best Actor Oscar, he not only drew on the emotions around his first marriage, but, with the director Robert Benton, rewrote the script to reflect his experience of the end of a relationship, something he describes as like "losing a limb". Making a film about divorce while going through a divorce, GQ ventures, sounds like emotional masochism. "I expected it to be a painful experience," he admits, "and I realised it was the opposite. It was liberating. If you're a writer, you get up in the morning and you write what's coming out of you. But an actor is working off someone else's creation. With this, I felt like the author of it."
The rift between father and sons, meanwhile, makes Death Of A Salesman perhaps Hoffman's most powerful use of his own autobiography. It was a hit on Broadway in 1984, and then in 1985 adapted by Michael Rudman for TV, for which Hoffman won an Emmy. After seeing Tootsie, it was Arthur Miller himself who suggested Hoffman play Willy Loman, not knowing that the play had been the teenage Hoffman's first interaction with drama of any kind, aged around 14. "I never thought about being an actor," he recalls. "I wanted to be a piano player and someone gave me a book of plays, American plays, when I was in high school. I opened it up and the first play is Death Of A Salesman. I'd never read a play. And I couldn't stop breaking down. I had to hide my tears because I didn't want my parents to say, 'Why are you crying?' I didn't want to say it was because I was reading an autobiography of my family."
To the struggling, diminutive high-school student, whose dad even shared a hopeless profession with Loman, "I was the Hal, who was the loser one, my brother was the Biff who had an even greater conflict with our father than me. And my father was a travelling salesman and by his own admission, a failure." When he came to play the part, Hoffman directly based his Willy Loman on his father. Naturally, with their son the star of a sellout smash on Broadway, his parents wanted to see the show. "I wouldn't say this if my father was still alive, but I won't hurt his feelings now. He came to New York. I was quite nervous, because I thought he'd put two and two together and I'll never forget it. He came backstage afterwards and I said, 'Hi Dad, how did you like it?' and he said, 'Boy, that guy is some loser.'"
"I think I became a success in spite of myself," he adds, even now, after decades of acclaim. "I tried hard not to be, so I could fulfil the promise of what my parents thought of me." Poignantly, Duvall, whom Hoffman's parents liked because he'd helped get their son his first job in television, recalls father and son as alike, both wanting to "run the show". "He used to complain about his father," says Duvall, "but he's very much like him."
Hoffman shares a birthday with his father, and recently spoke about a conversation they had when he was 50 and his father 80. "We were walking on the beach," said Hoffman. "And I said, 'Dad, you're 80 today. And I'm 50. Do you have any words you can give me?' And he said, 'Yeah, it's all bulls***.' And he turned around and walked away."
As well as Hoffman's insecurity about his physical appearance, perhaps more remarkably, accounts of some of his greatest films are peppered with stories of his doubts about his ability. In Quartet, while it's struck some as an oddly Anglophile choice of subject, at its heart it seems profoundly close to home. Hoffman has described how a Lifetime Achievement award in 1999 cast him into a depression, a thought that his career was all in the past. In it, Dame Maggie Smith's opera singer stops singing because of a fear of failure, and her sense that success is something now solely behind her. In Rain Man, such was his profound distrust in his own ability, he found himself, just days into shooting, pleading with director Barry Levinson to replace him with Richard Dreyfuss. "I think if he could have seen the role before he began, he might never have done it," says Levinson now, who remained patient on the set, even when Hoffman started jokingly referring to the film as "Two Schmucks In A Car". "I can only guess, but I think his insecurity is in some ways what propels him forward to a greater level, rather than, 'Yeah, see, I can do this, this is simple.' I think the challenge scares him and at the same time, motivates him."
In Tootsie, despite the essential cross-dressing fraud - and notwithstanding the bargain-basement nature of the soap his character is starring in - his Dorothy is as big a perfectionist as Michael (and Hoffman himself) about what her character will or won't do on screen. Hoffman's quest for authenticity has not always won him fans. As a young Method actor, he was notoriously difficult, insisting on doing things by the book, however banal the role. "You have a scene where you're pretending to be a tomato," he says, "and they say, 'You didn't even move!' and I said, 'That's right, a tomato doesn't have legs!'" After the Method training, but before any kind of stardom, the realities of being a jobbing actor could be a letdown. "We were following the way we were taught. You find another way, maybe you can roll!" he says, and actually starts a rolling-tomato scene on the sofa. "Or maybe, you know, you get fired." Or drive a director to distraction.
Sydney Pollack took home a Best Director Oscar for Tootsie, but, famously, with the quip that he'd give it back if he could have back the year of his life he spent making it with Hoffman. Hoffman himself tells me that Meryl Streep, his co-star in Kramer Vs Kramer, still hasn't forgiven him for the scene in which, for the sake of authenticity, he improvised and in their most fraught scene threw a wine glass at the wall beside her. Jon Voight, his co-star in Midnight Cowboy, remembers the lengths Hoffman went to in developing his crippled con-man character, including a visit to the dentist. "He had gotten these bad teeth," he recalls. "These terrible teeth, and I was so envious of them, and this wonderful limp, which was like a broken bird. I couldn't compete with it!" Hoffman took particular delight in eating out in character, and seeing the reaction. "He would enjoy people saying, 'Well, I don't know if he should come into this restaurant.' He's a bit of a devil in that way - blowing his nose and trying to get people's attention."
Barry Levinson, who assigned his star a minder when they were filming Rain Man in Las Vegas to stop Hoffman wandering off in character, also takes a positive view of the energies he devotes to getting inside someone else's head: "I always thought, it's part of the child in him, and the child is important to the man. He would always be saying, 'Why's he doing that? Why?' so in a sense you could say well that's annoying or you could say, well, he's trying to figure something out. You could say it's annoying or you could say it's an actor trying to discover. At the core of it was curiosity."
The extremes of the curiosity can be testified to by Carl Bernstein, played by Hoffman opposite Robert Redford in All The President's Men (1976). "It took a while to convince them [the Washington Post] that we were going to be focused on authenticity and accuracy," remembers Redford, talking exclusively to GQ. "Since authenticity and accuracy was paramount, it was really important who the actor was playing Carl Bernstein. [Hoffman] went off with Carl," he recalls, "and I went off with Bob Woodward, but we would meet in between and exchange thoughts and ideas of what we had both found out.
For Bernstein, the experience showed the obsessive quality that goes into Hoffman's preparation. "He was both very methodical and totally engaged, which is to say that he kind of stuck to me like glue for a few months," he says. Hoffman submerged himself in the life of Bernstein and his then girlfriend Nora Ephron, hanging out with Bernstein's friends, colleagues and even ex-girlfriends on his own, and asking them "infinite questions". "I remember one time," says Bernstein, "we were somewhere downtown and Dustin was with me and - it was before Nora and myself were married - we were together, and he imitated the way I walked. She said, something to the effect of, 'I hope you don't do that in the movie. It's like you're stealing his soul.'"
Bernstein also describes Hoffman's inability to concentrate solely on his own performance: "He can be controlling and interested in what others are doing as well as himself and looking all around, thinking, is the director doing his job, has the lighting guy got this right?" That sense of responsibility for a whole production, not just his own performance, comes across most stridently when discussing Luck, Michael Mann and David Milch's HBO racetrack drama that was cancelled last year after the death of a third horse during production.
Thoroughbreds die regularly in the course of the racing calendar, but with a show being filmed on American territory, Hoffman says, PETA had a high-profile target. "I think they're a radical and irresponsible group. And they found out that horses had died while filming and they distorted the facts of it... There are TV shows that have horses in it, that are shot in Romania or [other] places in Europe and this organisation has never said anything. But they had a target here and they exist on their donations. They have a budget of like $9m a year, and $1m is spent on their causes and $8m is spent on their salaries." Hoffman terms their media campaign "absolute bulls***". They were, he says, "intent on closing up this show to show their own power, and to get donations. It's a crime because it was inaccurate, it was distorted and 400 people were out of work that day."
I ask what piece of advice he would have given that awkward young man, convinced, even when he got his big break, that the wrong guy had got the job, and we come back to his shaky start in life: "There's nothing more important to a human being than their parents' love. And many times, you wind up giving them love in order to receive their love, a version of yourself that isn't you because you think that's what they want. And I think that's what I would have tried to resolve much earlier. Truthfully, I'm at a better point now than I have ever been. I think of my life as being Swiss cheese. And it's filled with holes. And I have fewer holes now than I've ever had."
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