After The Graduate made him a star, Dustin Hoffman signed on for unemployment
The Graduate was a colossal hit, yet Dustin Hoffman cleared only about 4,000 dollars from his 20,000-dollar fee once taxes and living costs were paid. When that ran out he claimed New York unemployment benefit of 55 dollars a week, living in a two-room West Village flat while critics dismissed him as lucky casting.
Hoffman was born in Los Angeles on August 8, 1937, and named after the silent-era actor Dustin Farnum. His father had been a prop supervisor at Columbia Pictures before turning to selling furniture, and the family descended from Jewish immigrants from Kiev and Iasi. He first wanted to be a classical pianist, then enrolled at Santa Monica College meaning to study medicine. An acting class he took expecting an easy grade changed his course, even though an aunt warned he was not handsome enough for the job.
A decade of struggle followed. At the Pasadena Playhouse he acted alongside Gene Hackman, and in 1960s New York the two shared lodgings with Robert Duvall, none of them imagining film careers. Duvall joked that Hoffman looked like Barbra Streisand in drag, and his looks and small frame left him hard to cast; for a while he quit acting to teach. He trained at the Actors Studio, made his Broadway debut with a bit part in 1961, and won a Drama Desk Award for the play Eh? in 1966.
Mike Nichols auditioned him that year for a Broadway musical and turned him down because he could not sing well enough, but was impressed enough to cast him as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. The part earned an Oscar nomination. Screenwriter Buck Henry argued the film changed a generation's idea of how leading men should look, and noted that many of Hoffman's little noises in the role were borrowed from Nichols himself.
Stung by reviews saying he was no character actor, he took the role of Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy to prove his range. He went on to win Best Actor twice, for Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979 and Rain Man in 1988, and drew on his own lean years for Tootsie. On stage he earned an Emmy after carrying his 1984 Broadway Willy Loman into a television film, and he directed his first feature, Quartet, in 2012.
Source: Dustin Hoffman
