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 title role of the musical "Jimmy Shine". Hoffman won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance. He was then offered the lead in "Midnight Cowboy" (1969), which he accepted partly to prove many critics were wrong about his acting range and the variety of characters he could portray. As author and critic Peter Biskind explains, "it was the very contrast between his preppy character in "The Graduate", and Ratso Rizzo" that appealed to Hoffman. "I had become troubled," recalls Hoffman, "by the reviews that I read of "The Graduate," that I was not a character actor, which I like to