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 Esio Trot". Hoffman was born on August 8, 1937, in Los Angeles, California, the second son of Lillian (née Gold; 1909–82) and Harry Hoffman (1908–87). His father worked as a prop supervisor (set decorator) at Columbia Pictures before becoming a furniture salesman. Hoffman was named after stage and silent screen actor Dustin Farnum. His elder brother, Ronald, is a lawyer and economist. Hoffman is Jewish, from an Ashkenazi Jewish family of immigrants from Kiev, Russian Empire, and Iași, Romania (the family's surname was spelled "Goikhman" in the Russian Empire). His upbringing was nonreligious, and he has said, "I don't have