Dustin Hoffman once quipped that a movie is essentially a big joke: one long preamble to the inevitable punch line. The same might be said of his conversation, each topic a shaggy-dog story, cueing up some zinger he has got primed. “Unfortunately, when I started out with sex as a teenager, I was what we call a premature ejaculator,” he confides, rounding off an anecdote starring his proclaimed youthful misfortune with the ladies. “The benefit is that when you get to be as old as I am, you’re still a premature ejaculator, but (the eyes twinkle) it takes about an hour and a half.”
God bless him. In the throes of his 68th winter, and happily married for the past 25 of them, Hoffman can not only sauce with the best, but do it with impunity. Indeed, the transition from angry young man to avuncular jester (via troubled midlifer) is one of the most interesting mutations of the screen legend. You can see it in Hoffman’s willingness to gas away on television chat shows (and can he gas). But it is also evident in recent films such as Finding Neverland, I Love Huckabees, or Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which Hoffman waltzes on, racks up a few key moments, then retires to the wings, happy as a sandboy. “I’m no longer trying to build a career. You reach a point where you say, ‘I don’t care where it is, I want to work with Johnny Depp (Hoffman is a huge fan) and I’m not going to worry about whether it’s a supporting role.’ Suddenly I’m enjoying acting as much as I did when I first started.”
Finding Neverland, with Hoffman popping up as Charles Frohman, agent to Depp’s JM Barrie, is a frontrunner in the Oscars hurdles. And if the same is not true of his latest movie, Meet the Fockers — the already commercially successful sequel to the Ben Stiller/Robert De Niro comedy Meet the Parents — at least Hoffman is having fun. He plays Bernie Focker, Stiller’s screen father, with none other than Barbra Streisand as his wife (the, if you must, Mother Focker). As a sort of frisky, new-age libertine, it would seem an exercise merely in playing himself. “Shortly after the movie started, Barbra and I were talking about ‘How much sex did you get?’,” he enthuses, “and we confessed that between the two of us, we got about seven days a week (dramatic pause)... I was once and she was six times.” The case rests.
Trim and tanned, with a head of thick grey hair, Hoffman looks good for his age, making a mockery of his former insecurity about his ample hooterage and diminutive stature (5ft 6in). He still refers to himself as a character actor — “By definition, someone who isn’t as good-looking as the leading man” — which would not square with his heroic CV, featuring such gems as Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, Papillon, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man, Tootsie and Rain Man. In the mid-1960s, however, when Tinseltown was in thrall to the Rocks and Troys, Hoffman had a point. The casting of someone so short and dark (and, incidentally, Jewish) for the part of Benjamin Braddock was deemed madness. But with The Graduate’s success in 1967, life for Hoffman changed for ever, as it did for Al Pacino and a host of other ethnic actors, ushering in an era of unconventional leads and outstanding film-making. Then the “suits” took over. “It started with Jaws,” Hoffman grumbles. “It was the first movie that opened in 2,000 theatres. They carpet-bombed the country. The possibility of garnering that amount of money on the opening weekend, suddenly it was a whole new ball game. It changed everything. We didn’t think about grosses when we were making movies.”
Back in his old LA stamping ground, in a hotel round the corner from the manicured Beverly Hills lawns, the milieu of Mrs Robinson, Hoffman sprinkles on the charm. In the past, he was the method-obsessed thesp, branded “difficult”. His rap sheet is impressive. “Dustin has an inability to distinguish a pimple from a tumour,” sniped Little Big Man’s director, Arthur Penn. Sydney Pollack, after acclaim for Tootsie, said: “I’d give it up if I could have back the nine months of my life I spent with Dustin making it.” Elmore Leonard was said to have written Get Shorty after a frustrating time spent with the actor trying to develop one of his novels.
Most famously, there is Laurence Olivier’s alleged remark, “Just try acting it, dear boy”, delivered to Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man after he reportedly drove a gravely ill Larry bananas, going nights without sleep and demanding countless retakes in order to affect the correct state of mental anguish required of his character. Hoffman says this story has been distorted, and that he and Olivier were actually very close. And yes, while he had been tired and emotional — “My first marriage had broken up, and Studio 54 was alive, so I partied. It was the 1970s” — Olivier’s response was an ironic retort, meant to raise a Hoffman chortle, “because he had been accused in the English press of being the same kind of method actor when he did Hamlet. It was a self-deprecating thing”.
At times a refusal to compromise got the better of Hoffman. Regrets? “A lot,” he says. “I had a chance to work with Fellini and said no. Twice I was going to work with Ingmar Bergman. Spielberg sent me three or four films, which I turned down. He asked me to do Close Encounters, and I didn’t want to do it. I had very silly reasons that I regret now. Schindler’s List, Amistad... It’s shocking that I got so tied up in reasons not to take parts. But I’m working through it.”
At least he has a sense of humour about it. Witness his pièce de résistance, Tootsie. “That was a satire on me being called a perfectionist. What it’s like to study acting under great teachers like Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, then go out into the commercial field and try to get a job where they want you to throw out everything you’ve learnt, or get fired.” He reminisces about the scene where he plays a tomato in a television ad, obsessing over whether said fruit would have legs or be able to sit down. “That’s funny,” he chuckles. “I was certainly parodying myself then.”
The seven Academy Award nominations and two best- actor Oscars to his name do not lie. (Hoffman won for Kramer vs Kramer and Rain Man, both awards gratefully accepted after years spent trashing the Academy.) And if film stardom was never in his grand design — he roomed with fellow nonconformists Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall while they tried to hack it on Broadway — it would be no exaggeration to say that he is one of the most important actors of the past four decades. Three, if you disregard most of his output of the 1990s, Hook (Spielberg’s revenge) and Sphere.
Hoffman has always had an interest in the press, and not only because he once sued Los Angeles Magazine for $3m. Having played journalists on several occasions, his descent from Carl Bernstein, the breaker of the Watergate scandal, to the sleazy tabloid television hack of Mad City is as much a comment on his perception of how low the media has sunk as it is on the way his own roles have changed. He still blames the fourth estate for the demise of his Warren Beatty buddy comedy Ishtar (1987). “They pummelled it before they saw it,” he mourns. “The press had a contract out on that film.” (He also fingers David Puttnam, then head of Columbia Pictures, a man who once called Hoffman “a malevolent American pest”.) Even the personal triumph of Rain Man a year later, with Hoffman as a faithfully researched autistic, could not prevent a fallow period. But his artistic mojo was rediscovered with 1997’s Wag the Dog. That film, about a media-fabricated war, seems as eerily resonant today as when it was first released, quite coincidentally, just as the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. Hoffman tells how its director, Barry Levinson, called recently, excited about having shown it to some students in Washington DC. “He said, when my character says ‘We’re creating a war, a fictional war, in Albania’, and they say ‘Why Albania?’, and I say ‘Wait a minute... (slowly) because they have the bomb’, he said there was no laughter, there was a gasp.”
Hoffman is not one for revisiting old works, only acci- dentally catching things on television and either approving or expressing frustration. “Either way, there’s a nostalgia about it that makes me switch to another channel,” he says. “It’s very similar to any of us that look at photographs of our life. Where did the time go? Hackman says he never goes to see his films at all. He does the work and that’s it, it’s done.” Hoffman did, though, view The Graduate again recently, reuniting with Katharine Ross to do the DVD commentary. “I hadn’t seen it in God knows how long, but I think that’s a wonderful film, technically wonderful. God, it’s good.”
Hoffman will next be seen in the Cuban gangster flick The Lost City (as Meyer Lansky), and is adding a voice to the animated feature Racing Stripes. Given that his part-time Kensington address will become permanent from next September — nothing to do with his anti-Bush stance: “No, I love it there. I’ve loved it there for years” — there may be British films, too. Perhaps the burst of energy is down to something else altogether, for there is no force more galvanising than the receipt of your gold watch from the Establishment. In the past few years, nobody has received more lifetime-achievement gongs than Hoffman — Golden Globes, American Film Institute, Berlin, Bafta, Empire, you name it. “Either me,” he joshes, “or Macaulay Culkin.” On current evidence, it would all seem a tad premature.
Meet the Fockers opens on January 28
