Dustin Hoffman

Dustin Hoffman, born in 1937, American stage and motion-picture actor, regarded as one of the finest actors of the late 20th century.

Dustin Hoffman was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He initially pursued a music career as a concert pianist. Small in stature with unprepossessing features, Hoffman nevertheless switched to acting and in the 1960s began landing roles in off-Broadway stage productions in New York City. After appearing in several minor films and television shows, he caught the attention of film and stage director Mike Nichols. Nichols cast the nearly 30-year-old actor as a naive 20-year-old seduced by a middle-aged woman in The Graduate (1967), a successful film that earned Hoffman an Academy Award nomination and catapulted him to stardom.

Two years later Hoffman was nominated for another Academy Award for his role as the vagrant Ratso Rizzo in director John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy, which captured the Oscar for best picture. In 1976 Hoffman played journalist Carl Bernstein in All the President’s Men, a film about the Washington Post reporters who uncovered the Watergate political scandal.

Hoffman won his first Academy Award for his performance as a father fighting to maintain custody of his son in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). He earned strong reviews when he played an unemployed actor who becomes a soap-opera heroine in the 1982 comedy Tootsie (directed by Sydney Pollack).

Hoffman returned to the stage several times in the 1980s. He starred as Willy Loman in the 1984 Broadway production of playwright Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, a production that was filmed for television the following year by director Volker Schlöndorff. The film version won Hoffman both a Golden Globe and an Emmy award. In 1989 he won acclaim on the London stage for his portrayal of Shylock in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

Hoffman captured his second Academy Award for his performance as an autistic savant in the 1988 film Rain Man, directed by Barry Levinson. The actor’s other films include Little Big Man (directed by Arthur Penn, 1970), Lenny (directed by Bob Fosse, 1974), Marathon Man (also directed by Schlesinger, 1976), Dick Tracy (1990), Hook (directed by Steven Spielberg, 1991), Outbreak (1995), Wag the Dog (also directed by Levinson, 1997), and Moonlight Mile (2002). He also appeared in the John Grisham thriller Runaway Jury (2003); the comedy Meet the Fockers (2004); the drama Finding Neverland (2004), about author J. M. Barrie; and the historical fantasy Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006), based on a novel by Patrick Süskind.