Dustin Hoffman | Biography, Plays, Movies, & Facts | Britannica (2025)

Dustin Hoffman (born August 8, 1937, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is an acclaimed American actor known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable types. Short in stature and not typically handsome, he helped to usher in a new Hollywood tradition of average-looking but emotionally explosive leading men.

Hoffman began acting at age 19 after dropping out of music studies at California’s Santa Monica City College. He then moved to New York City, where he struggled for several years in odd jobs and eventually landed small parts on television and leading roles Off-Broadway, where he won an Obie Award.

After appearing in the minor comedy The Tiger Makes Out (1967), Hoffman was cast in his second film, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967), beating out contemporaries Robert Redford and Charles Grodin. Hoffman was 30 years old when he played the 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock, an upper-middle-class college graduate who, in a search for a meaningful future, aimlessly drifts into an affair with a married woman who is the age of his parents. A tremendously successful social comedy, the film struck a nerve with youthful audiences disenchanted with the American establishment, and Hoffman was launched as a star.

In John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, which won an Academy Award for best picture of 1969, Hoffman played “Ratso” Rizzo, a tubercular homeless man who develops a friendship with an unsuccessful male prostitute (played by Jon Voight). Grim and downbeat in its depiction of a heartless New York City, the film was another unlikely success for Hoffman.

The actor moved smoothly into the 1970s playing numerous antiheroes such as the powerless witness to Native American genocide in Little Big Man (1970), the cowardly mathematician who violently defends his home in Straw Dogs (1971), the self-destructive comic Lenny Bruce in Lenny (1974), and an ex-convict who cannot resist the lure of crime in Straight Time (1978). The decade also saw Hoffman playing journalist Carl Bernstein as he and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) investigate the Watergate scandal in All the President’s Men (1976).

Thrice previously nominated for the Oscar, Hoffman finally won a best actor award for his sympathetic portrayal of a divorced single father in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and earned another nomination for Tootsie (1982), in which he played an out-of-work actor who, while masquerading as a woman, finds steady employment on a daytime soap opera.

Two returns to the stage proved great triumphs for Hoffman in the 1980s. First was his much-lauded performance as Willy Loman in the 1984 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which was adapted for television the following year by CBS and earned Hoffman an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award. Always determined to select a challenging variety of roles, he next appeared on stage in London as Shylock in Sir Peter Hall’s production of The Merchant of Venice (1989). For his film work, Hoffman closed out the decade with another best actor Oscar for his convincing depiction of a middle-aged autistic savant in Rain Man (1988). Not unlike Hoffman’s earlier roles, Rain Man’s Raymond Babbitt is a difficult character to embrace because of his emotionless nature, but the actor elicits just the right amount of sympathy from an audience.

After a disappointing series of big-budget Hollywood projects such as Hook (1991), Billy Bathgate (1991), Hero (1992), Outbreak (1995), and Sphere (1998), the actor returned to form as a sleazy, fame-hungry Hollywood producer who coconspires to fool the entire world into believing that the United States is at war with Albania in Wag the Dog (1997), a biting political satire that gave Hoffman his seventh Academy Award nomination. He later portrayed the grand inquisitor in the French production of Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), and in 2003 he appeared in the courtroom thriller Runaway Jury. In 2004 he starred opposite Lily Tomlin in I Heart Huckabees, a comedy about a husband-and-wife detective team that helps clients solve their existential problems, and with Robert De Niro in the broad comedy Meet the Fockers.

Hoffman’s subsequent films include Stranger Than Fiction (2006) and the children’s fantasy Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (2007). Hoffman and Stranger Than Fiction costar Emma Thompson played lonely strangers who fall in love in Last Chance Harvey (2008). He reprised his Meet the Fockers role in its sequel, Little Fockers (2010), and later appeared as the title character’s father in the dark comedy Barney’s Version (2010). In addition, Hoffman lent his voice to the computer-animated films The Tale of Despereaux (2008), Kung Fu Panda (2008), Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011), and Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016).

Shifting his focus to television, Hoffman starred as an ex-con gambler on the HBO series Luck (2011–12), a drama set in the world of professional horse racing. He returned to the big screen as a restaurant owner in Chef (2014) and then appeared in the television adaptation Roald Dahl’s Esio Trot (2015), based on a children’s book about a bachelor romancing his tortoise-loving neighbour (Judi Dench). In 2017 he starred in The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), playing a sculptor preparing for a retrospective of his work in New York.

In 2012, at the age of 75, Hoffman made his debut as a film director with Quartet, an ensemble comedy about former opera singers residing in an English retirement home. That same year he was named a Kennedy Center honoree.