Dustin Hoffman Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University, when he was 21. "It was a great experience for me," he said. "All my life I had wanted to get inside a prison or a mental hospital. . . . I wanted to get inside where behavior, human behavior, was so exposed. All the things the rest of us were feeling and stopping up were coming out of these people." He used that experience to help him develop the character of Raymond Babbitt, a high-functioning autistic savant, yet a person who critic David Denby described as "a strangely shuttered genius." Hoffman created certain
Dustin Hoffman Alan Alda the part. But Nichols was so impressed with Hoffman's overall audition he cast him as the male lead in the movie "The Graduate" (1967). Hoffman played the character of Benjamin Braddock, who returns to his wealthy parents' home in California after graduating from college. Confused about what to do with his life, he is seduced into having an affair with Mrs. Robinson, an alcoholic and a neurotic, and the wife of his father's law partner. This was Hoffman's first major role, and he received an Academy Award nomination for it but lost to Rod Steiger in "In the