Source: IMDb.Com

Only in the 1960s, with Hollywood conventions being stood on their heads along with societal mores, could this physically unprepossessing actor have made it as a leading man; in a previous era Hoffman would probably have plied his trade as a character actor rather than a powerful megastar. Although he shot his first movie, Madigan's Million in 1966 (released in 1968), Hoffman first impressed 1960s audiences in The Graduate (1967, earning his first Academy Award nomination), playing a disaffected, uncertain young man who drifts into a sexual affair with a woman in his parents' circle, only to fall in love with her daughter. The film's droll humor, relatively frank sexuality, satirical view of the upper middle class, and observation of a 'troubled' younger generation made it a surprise smash.

The bashful, nasally Hoffman soon proved himself capable of submerging himself in any role. His performance as street hustler Ratso Rizzo in 1969's Midnight Cowboy (another Oscar-nominated turn) was uncannily convincing. As an Old West rogue in 1970's Little Big Man Hoffman's scenes as a 121-year-old man show him radiating that age through layers of latex makeup. During the 1970s he consistently knocked out critics and audiences in a variety of roles, playing a doomed Devil's Island prisoner in Papillon (1973), hounded comedian Lenny Bruce in Lenny (1974, again Oscar-nominated), and Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein in All the President's Men (1976). Often described as taking 'Method' techniques to the point of absurdity, he once kept himself awake for days to look more tired for a scene in 1976's Marathon Man.

Constantly looking for challenges, Hoffman played an ex-con in Straight Time (1978) and earned some of the best reviews of his career (and some of his worst for 1979's Agatha). He then took a much warmer role, becoming a modern everyman in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) as a careerist man whose wife walks out on him, leaving him to raise their son - and reorder the priorities in his life. The performance earned him an Academy Award. Several years later he took another sharp turn, tackling a role that some people thought unplayable: a failed actor who disguises as a woman and achieves great success on TV. The film was Tootsie (1982), an enormous hit which earned Hoffman an Oscar nomination and convinced whatever naysayers were left that there was nothing he couldn't do.

Mixing stage and screen work in the 1980s, he created a new interpretation of the Willy Loman character in a 1984 revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. (He recreated the performance on television a year later and won an Emmy Award in the process.) In 1987 he teamed with pal Warren Beatty for the megabomb Ishtar. The two were very funny as hapless songwriter/performers, but the film wasn't; both stars attributed its failure to lack of youth appeal, rather than the fact that it was a lousy movie. To ameliorate this perceived problem, Hoffman teamed with handsome young superstar Tom Cruise for his next film, Rain Man (1988), limning the character of an autistic savant with skill and integrity and earning another Best Actor Oscar in the process. In 1989 he was cast, rather improbably, as Sean Connery's son (and Matthew Broderick's father) in Family Business. Then in Beatty's own stab at the youth market, Dick Tracy (1990), Hoffman contributed a brief but funny cameo as the petty crook Mumbles. The year 1991 saw him cast as two legendary bad guys: gangster Dutch Schultz in Billy Bathgate and Captain Hook in Hook (a performance he based, in part, on William F. Buckley, with some Terry-Thomas thrown in). In 1992 he put a new slant on Ratso Rizzo as the title character in Hero, then played a heroic army medical researcher in Outbreak (1995).

But what past led the actor, Los Angeles-born and standing at 5'6", to stardom?

Dustin Lee Hoffman was born August 8, 1937 in the city of Angels. He graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1955 and went to Santa Monica City College, though dropped out after a year due to poor grades. Before he did, however, he took an acting course after being told that "nobody flunks acting." Hoffman decided to go into acting because he wasn't keen on the idea of work or going into the service. After training at The Pasadena Playhouse for two years, he eventually landed his first role in the television show Naked City, and the rest is, literally, history.