From "The Graduate" to "Tootsie," he has tackled diverse roles — and he's still at it as he now turns 85. A look back at this charismatic actor's impressive career.
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Dustin Hoffman's most memorable roles
He has starred in at least 61 movies. As Dustin Hoffman turns 85 on August 8, here are highlights from his career.
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The Graduate (1967)
Dustin Hoffman made his film debut in 1967, in the comedy "The Tiger Makes Out."
His breakthrough, however, came with his second movie, made that same year. His lead role in the hit comedy-drama "The Graduate," as 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate who goes through an unconventional sentimental education, earned him his first Oscar nomination — and turned him into a star.
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Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Hoffman turned down most of the roles he was offered after that initial success, preferring to perform for the theater. To demonstrate that he also could play a sleazy character contrasting with his clean-cut graduate part, he then took on the role of a crippled conman in John Schlesinger's cult classic, "Midnight Cowboy," starring alongside Jon Voight. Both actors were nominated for an Oscar.
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Little Big Man (1970)
Turning to another genre, Hoffman starred in a satirical western in 1970. Directed by Arthur Penn, "Little Big Man" is about a white male child who grew up in a Cheyenne Native American community. Hoffman depicted in the movie different phases of the long life of his character, Jack Crabb, from a teenager to a 121-year-old man.
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Straw Dogs (1971)
One of Sam Peckinpah's greatest films, the psychological thriller "Straw Dogs," stars Hoffman and Susan George, a couple that moves to an isolated English town to avoid the stress of the Vietnam era in the US. Instead of the peaceful life they were hoping for, they face the locals' vicious harassment. Violence and a long rape scene made the film controversial at the time of its release.
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Lenny (1974)
Stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce was renowned for his free-style improvisations that combined his satirical views on politics or religion with whatever vulgarity was on his mind — a unseen style that led him to be arrested. Dustin Hoffman stunningly embodied the restless icon of counter-culture comedy in the biopic "Lenny," and earned his third Oscar nomination.
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All the President's Men (1976)
Less than two years after the Watergate scandal, this film revisits how it was uncovered. "All the President's Men" is the adaptation of the same-title memoirs written by the two journalists who investigated the story for the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford). It remains one of the most important films on investigative journalism ever made.
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Kramer vs. Kramer
In this story about a couple's divorce and its impact on the family's young son, Hoffman's character evolves from a workaholic advertising art director into a protective dad. Without providing easy answers, the film reflected the period's changing views on the role of a father and a mother (depicted by Meryl Streep). Hoffman won his first Oscar with the role.
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Tootsie (1982)
This one renewed Hollywood comedy in the 1980s: In Sydney Pollack's "Tootsie," Dustin Hoffman took on the role of Michael Dorsey, a talented but difficult actor with whom no one wants to work with. To land a part, he dresses as a woman and eventually becomes a TV sensation. The film poked fun at the way show business worked, while commenting on sexism.
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Death of a Salesman (1985)
After starring in a Broadway version of Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Hoffman also depicted the aging self-deluded salesman in the TV movie adaptation directed by German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff. Hoffman won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his performance.
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Rain Man (1988)
Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) gets to know his brother, Raymond (Hoffman), when their estranged father dies and they travel together. Hoffman's unforgettable depiction of a an autistic savant with prodigious abilities as a mental calculator earned him his second Academy Award.
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Hook (1991)
The younger generation might not remember Hoffman as a charming graduate, but rather as Captain Hook in Steven Spielberg's fantasy adventure film, which also starred Robin Williams as Peter Pan and Julia Roberts as Tinker Bell. Though the film received mixed reviews, Hoffman obtained a Golden Globe nomination.
Released a month before the Lewinsky sex scandal involving Bill Clinton emerged, the black comedy "Wag the Dog" showed how a spin doctor (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood film producer (Hoffman) constructed a fake war to distract the electorate's attention from a fictional president's advances on an underage girl. The political satire led to a seventh Oscar nomination for Hoffman.
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The Meyerowitz Stories (2017)
The actor is pictured here at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2017. He starred in one of the competing films, Noah Baumbach's comedy-drama "The Meyerowitz Stories," alongside Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Emma Thompson.
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As They Made Us (2022)
As he turns 85 on August 8, Hoffman remains professionally active. His incredibly rich filmography includes over 60 roles. His latest to date is that of a dying patriarch in the family drama "As they Made Us" written, directed, and produced by Mayim Bialik.
Although many aspiring actors move to Los Angeles hoping to make it big, Dustin Hoffman, who was born there on August 8, 1937, preferred to move to New York City at the age of 20 to find acting gigs.
Sharing an apartment with Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman, he picked up odd jobs while trying to build his career on Broadway and studying at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, which led him to become a dedicated method actor.
'The Graduate' turned him into a Hollywood heartthrob Image: Kinowelt
After Hoffman's film debut in "The Tiger Makes Out" in 1967, his breakthrough role came later that same year.
'The Graduate,' the film that would change everything
Filmmaker Mike Nichols cast him as the lead character in "The Graduate," which tells the story of an aimless recent college graduate who is seduced by an older woman.
It was an unconventional choice at the time, as this type of role would usually have been given to a tall, handsome actor and not "a short, funny-looking Jewish guy," as Hoffman describes himself. The film, featuring great songs by Simon and Garfunkel, turned out to be an unexpected box office hit, and 55 years later, it remains a classic.
Hoffman didn't expect to become a superstar so quickly either. "The truth of it is that I got a lot of crappy parts offered to me and I didn't want to make movies any more; I wanted to go back to the theater," he once told The Guardian.
A completely different character, the seedy conman Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo in "Midnight Cowboy," was attractive enough to make him return to act in movies in 1969. The only X-rated film to ever win a Best Picture Academy Award, this other cult movie established Hoffman's reputation as a versatile actor. (The rating was later changed to R.)
He's since tackled practically all genres over the last five decades of his career and has won numerous awards, including two Oscars and five additional nominations for Best Actor.
Dustin Hoffman receiving the Oscar from Jane Fonda for his role in 'Kramer vs. Kramer' in 1980Image: AP
Though his most notable work was done from the 1960s through the 1980s, his over-60-movie filmography is simply too broad to mention all of his successful roles.
In addition to the films referenced in the gallery above, Hoffman has starred in Wolfgang Petersen's "Outbreak" (1995), Luc Besson's "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc" (1999) and Tom Tykwer's "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" (2006), among many others.
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Still active and trying new things out
The actor also directed his first film in 2012, "Quartet," which received positive reviews.
Successfully treated for cancer a year later, Dustin Hoffman did not retire from acting afterwards.
In 2017, he was at the Cannes Film Festival to promote "The Meyerowitz Stories," where he plays a forgotten abstract artist with a dysfunctional family. The Netflix production was released later that year.
The movie "As They Made Us" opened in movie theaters in April 2022 , featuring Hoffman as the patriarch with a degenerative disease in a dysfunctional family.
The celebrated actor is also the voice of Master Shifu in the "Kung Fu Panda" films. The scriptwriters of the animated martial arts comedies were probably inspired by the challenging diversity of Hoffman's roles when they made his character say, "If you only do what you can do, you'll never be better than what you are."
This is an updated version of an English article that was originally published on August 8, 2017.
