A two-time Oscar-winning legendary actor, Dustin Hoffman has played in unforgettable films, from Macadam Cowboy to Marathon Man and Tootsie. But what does he think was the most difficult role of his career? The answer will surprise you!
Now 86 years old, Dustin Hoffman is a legendary actor, who has long had nothing to prove. The son of a set decorator, he studied drama at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, before leaving for New York to take classes with the famous Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio.
But his beginnings were particularly laborious, as he himself recalled in 2016 in a fascinating portrait published by the Guardian : it will take him five attempts to join the prestigious school founded by Lee Strasberg, alongside future classmates Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman.
Trained in Method Acting, that of Robert de Niro or Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman was notoriously known for being a die-hard actor in the degree of investment in his roles. The most famous example remains that of Marathon Man.
Acacias
Between exhausting races, a strict diet and drowning attempts during a famous scene in the film where Dr. Szell’s henchmen burst into his house while he is in his bathtub, to the point that the production was obliged to give emergency oxygen to the actor, Method Acting ended up really annoying Laurence Olivier on the set, to the point that he released a famous apostrophe to her: “why not try playing? It’s much easier!”
Winner of the Oscar for Best Actor twice, in 1980 for Kramer vs. Kramer and in 1989 for Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman has numerous masterpieces on his CV, some of which have marked the history of cinema: Men of the president, Macadam Cowboy, Little Big Man, The Graduate, which earned him his first Oscar nomination in 1968; Tootsie by Sidney Pollack.
Or his extraordinary, very intense composition in Lenny at Bob Fosse, where he plays one of the most famous and controversial American comedians of the 60s. In an interview with the magazine Rolling Stones in December 1974, the actor considered that it was the most intense and difficult role of his career.
Paramount Pictures
50 years later, is this still the same opinion? Not really… With such a wide spectrum of roles, one would logically think that Dustin Hoffman would readily cite his role as Ratso Rizzo in Macadam Cowboy For example. Or why not his brilliant composition in Papillon by Franklin J. Schaffner. Or even the grueling one of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. It was obviously not knowing him well.
In March 2016, he declared that the most difficult role of his career was… the voice of Master Shifu in the Kung Fu Panda saga. “I am very serious” he said into the microphone of Huffington Post; “Animating is seriously the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I hated it. I thought I’d be in the room with other people to bounce around, and instead I was left there alone for hours. When I got home, I said, “I just finished my very first day of work.”