There's method in his madness. Dustin Hoffman talks to Donald Clarke about his reputation as one of the most difficult men in Hollywood, his latest roll in Meet the Fockers and his time as a tomato
Some time into my interview with Dustin Hoffman I find myself having a minor disagreement with one of the PR people about how much time we have left. While we're scowling at one another with our hoity-toity faces, Dustin is laughing and waving his little arms about the place.
"You know if this was a film, this would be the first scene," he giggles. "There is all this animus between the two of you and that is how love stories begin. By the second act you'd be in love."
This is the man who David Puttnam, head of Columbia Pictures during the making of the actor's disastrous 1987 comedy Ishtar, described as "a malevolent American pest". It's the same fellow who reputedly forced an elderly, infirm Laurence Olivier to join him in punishing theatrical exercises during the making of Marathon Man. "I'd give it up if I could have back the nine months of my life I spent with Dustin making it," director Sydney Pollack, admittedly a bit of a card, said of the timeless Tootsie.
Yet, over the last two decades, Hoffman's image has begun to soften around the edges. He no longer huffs his way through speeches at the Oscars. Colleagues manage to hold their tempers when talking about him.
"He said he really would try and do things my way," David O Russell, the director of last year's I Heart Huckabees, told me. "Actors sometimes say they will trust you, but they don't mean it. He really meant it." And then, of course, there was his extraordinary 2003 appearance on the Graham Norton show, during which he attempted impersonations of various inmates of that year's Big Brother house.
He seems like a very different chap to the man who, when awarded the Oscar for Kramer vs Kramer in 1980 (a second came for Rain Man in 1988), used the opportunity to berate the Academy for turning acting into a competitive sport. Has he really mellowed? "Well there's two answers," he says. "One is that I still believe what I said then. I remember seeing Victor Borge on the Johnny Carson show years ago and Carson said: 'Victor, who do you think is the greatest pianist?' And he said: 'I don't know how to answer that. If I say Vladimir Horowitz, then that just eliminates Arthur Rubenstein.' I don't know what best means.
"As to the second part of your question, mellower is not a word I would use. A large part of my lifetime was spent not being able to accept, not just the success, but the so-called gift. We all have our gifts and often don't feel comfortable with them. When you look at the big guys - look at Brendan Behan or Dylan Thomas - I would say that the same was true. They couldn't deal with their gift. I can do that a little better now."
At any rate, Hoffman, who has been in and out of therapy all his adult life, now comes across as a worryingly jolly, resolutely even-tempered middle-aged man. He is, in fact, 66, but, with a good head of springy grey hair and clean, tobacco-coloured skin, could pass for 15 years younger. Of all the great characters he has created - sleazy hustler Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, cigaretting journalist Carl Bernstein in All The President's Men, annoying actor Michael Dorsey in Tootsie - he seems closest to Bernie Focker, the bluff, ageing hippie he plays in this week's broad comedy Meet the Fockers. In a sequel to his own Meet the Parents, Jay Roach casts Hoffman and Barbra Streisand as the free-spirited parents of the nervy male nurse played by Ben Stiller. Robert De Niro is back as the insane right-wing father of Stiller's girlfriend.
It is what it is.
"I first met Barbra back in the early 1960s," Hoffman says slightly mistily. "At that stage she just wanted to be an actor. We met because I was going with her roommate. She didn't sing at all then. She didn't think she was good enough. Her roommate told me that she never heard her sing, because she really didn't think she was that good."
So, making the film must have been an absolute hoot. Or is doing a light comedy every bit as hard work as making, say, Midnight Cowboy? A little bit of steel enters his voice. "Oh it's all work. It's all exactly the same." There is in his answer a hint of the committed thespian he parodied so brilliantly in Tootsie. Yet his first ambition was to be a concert pianist. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Hoffman, the son of a furniture salesman and occasional movie props buyer, took his first acting class at the Santa Monica City College simply to boost his plummeting grades. "Nobody flunks acting," he was told. Later, with his buddy and sometime flatmate Gene Hackman, he made his way to New York and threw himself at any job, however menial. This was the mid-1960s, but actors were still expected to be tall, chiselled and Protestant.
Yet somehow Hoffman, short, dark and Jewish, found himself cast in Mike Nichols's beloved 1967 comedy, The Graduate.
"We were deemed character actors," he says. "I don't know why it changed. I suppose Mike Nichols changed it by casting me, because the part as written was Robert Redford. This guy looked like Robert Redford. There may have been other things that caused it, but the culture suddenly changed. In the 1950s it was Troy Donahue and Rock Hudson. These guys were models. I mean, that still exists. Women still go to the films and say I am as beautiful as this person or that person. I am as beautiful as Catherine Zeta-Jones."
Maybe film culture has changed back again. There are not many lead actors today who look like Dustin Hoffman or Gene Hackman.
"Yes. I think that's right," he says forcefully. "When I came in the establishment was something you didn't want to be. You didn't want to open that door. We were anti-establishment. You didn't go to the Academy Awards. You didn't go to the Golden Globes. You didn't get dressed up. This was the Beat Generation. You didn't own up that you were in a commercial. Success meant that you sold out. If the mass liked what you were doing then, you were doing something wrong. Now, that has all changed." In that exciting era, directors found many uses for Hoffman's cautious, niggling intelligence. He aged 100 years in Arthur Penn's epic western, Little Big Man. He turned from mouse into, well, homicidal mouse in Sam Peckinpah's dubiously misogynistic masterpiece, Straw Dogs. He delivered an extraordinary impersonation of Lenny Bruce in Bob Fosse's Lenny. But all the while he was developing a reputation for being insanely difficult. The stories suggest that the character he played in Tootsie is a not-that-heightened version of himself. We learn that Michael Dorsey, who later dresses up as a woman to break into daytime soap opera, once refused to sit down when playing a tomato because it would be unrealistic.
"I must say that when that film came out a lot of actors understood it," he says. "And not just on a comedic level. We learned acting in these great cathedrals in those days from people like Stanford Meisner, Bobby Lewis and Stella Adler. You would go there for days and days and learn the craft of acting and one of the things that it came down to was specificity. If you are going to play a tomato, then what kind of a tomato is it? You had better go out in the garden and observe tomatoes. There are different types, you know."
So he is saying that he would, quite literally, have refused to sit down as a tomato? "Oh I did. You go out into the world to get hired. If you are lucky enough to get something, then there you are playing a tomato and the director is saying, 'OK Hoffman, move!', you would say, 'No I can't'. It's your training that is motivating you."
He is Michael Dorsey. This is rather like meeting Al Pacino and discovering he really does run an Italian crime syndicate. Hoffman shakes his head in mock outrage.
"Because a tomato doesn't have legs! What do you do? Do you then betray all your training and move to keep the job?" He's very funny, but I am not sure he's joking.
"And I will tell you right now. Bob Duvall, Gene Hackman and I were very close friends in those days. Nobody expected us to get anywhere, least of all ourselves. When we were working in those off-off-Broadway things and these situations came up we would just say 'no!'. And so we were deemed difficult. The greatest liberty was that we could just walk."
He has always said that the most famous story concerning his collaboration with Olivier on Marathon Man has been taken out of context. It was reported that, to prepare himself for a scene in which his character was supposed to have been kept awake for days on end, Hoffman himself refused to go to sleep all night. "Have you ever tried acting, dear boy?" his Lordship was alleged to have said. Hoffman now says that he was, in fact, out partying at Studio 54 the night before and that Olivier's comment was a mild rebuke for his debauchery.
"If you pick up the paper in the morning you believe what you read. 'Oh, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston broke up.' And suddenly you become an expert on that. 'Oh look, that's Angelina Jolie's fault.' My wife always says that I will be stuck with this forever. I am the difficult one. With Jack Nicholson they always said it was drugs. Warren Beatty is supposed to have screwed everything that jumped off the curve. I'll tell you, in reality a few of us had as many girls as Warren."
His marriage to dancer Anne Byrne broke down in 1977, but his subsequent relationship with Lisa Gottsegen, a lawyer, seems to have brought him happiness. The two were married in 1980 and have remained together ever since. They have four children, the youngest of whom left the nest recently, ("The empty bedrooms are terrible") and they are now thinking of moving permanently into the posh home they keep in London.
Though Dustin found personal stability in the 1980s and 1990s, the quality of the work did decline somewhat. Indeed, it is hard to think of a single Hoffman film from the 1990s that is worth crossing the road to see. Wag the Dog? Just about. Sphere? Oh dear. Hook? Eugh! Outbreak? Spare us.
But things are picking up. He was the best thing in the deeply puzzling I Heart Huckabees and turns in a lovely cameo in the Oscar-nominated Finding Neverland. Inspired, perhaps, by the birth of his first grandchild last year, he has contributed his voice to the upcoming kids' movie, Racing Stripes. And then there is Meet the Fockers, which has taken a quite phenomenal amount of money at the US box office. Why all the activity? "You go back to discover where your own truth is," he says gnomically.
"You are ultimately trying to put out there what is altering inside you. How do you feel about getting older? How do you feel about mortality? And there is a lot of that in Bernie Focker. It's like Strindberg's The Dance of Death. Do not go gentle into that good night. If I am going to die let me die dancing and fucking. Yeah."
