Richard Dreyfuss won Best Actor at 30, then nearly lost everything
At 30 years and 125 days, Richard Dreyfuss became the youngest man ever to win the Best Actor Oscar, taking the record from Marlon Brando. He is still the shortest winner in that category. By 1982 a cocaine habit had him blacking out at the wheel of his Mercedes and landing under arrest.
Dreyfuss was born in Brooklyn on October 29, 1947. His father, an attorney who later ran restaurants and a plastics firm, had been badly wounded by a mortar blast at the Battle of the Bulge and walked with crutches and canes ever after. His mother was a peace activist. After a brief move to Europe in 1956 the family settled in Los Angeles, where he went to Beverly Hills High and first acted at a temple arts centre. He grew up believing he was related to Alfred Dreyfus, and he has said a great-grandaunt, Hesya Helfman, took part in assassinating Tsar Alexander II.
During the Vietnam War he was a conscientious objector, spending two years of alternative service as a clerk in a Los Angeles hospital while picking up small TV parts. His film career began with a single uncredited line in The Graduate (1967). A key role in George Lucas's American Graffiti in 1973 and his first lead in the Canadian film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz opened the door to Steven Spielberg, who cast him in Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
His win for The Goodbye Girl came at the 1978 ceremony. The age record lasted 25 years until Adrien Brody took it in 2003, but at about 5 foot 4 Dreyfuss remains the shortest Best Actor. Between 1973 and 1978 his films grossed more than $900 million. Then, from around 1978, came heavy cocaine use; he says he remembers nothing of making Whose Life Is It Anyway? In 1982 he was arrested after passing out while driving and hitting a tree.
Court-ordered rehab led to a comeback with Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986) and Stakeout (1987), and he narrated Rob Reiner's Stand by Me as the grown-up Gordie. In 1991 he produced and starred in an HBO film about the Dreyfus Affair, playing the officer Georges Picquart. A second Best Actor nomination arrived for Mr. Holland's Opus (1995), and later television roles included Meyer Lansky and Bernie Madoff.
Source: Richard Dreyfuss
