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 Farnum and he were the parents of radio actress Estelle "Dustine" Runyon (1925–1983). After great success in a number of stage roles, Farnum landed his first film role in 1914 in the movie "Soldiers of Fortune", and later in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Squaw Man". He died of kidney failure on July 3, 1929, at Post Graduate Hospital in Manhattan, New York City, aged 55. According to an interview in the April 1975 edition of "Playboy", Dustin Hoffman was named after Farnum. Additionally, according to an interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR, on January 16, 2013, Dustin says