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
Hero (1992 film) Hero (1992 film) Hero (released in the United Kingdom and Ireland as Accidental Hero) is a 1992 American comedy-drama film directed by Stephen Frears. It was written by David Webb Peoples from a story written by Peoples, Laura Ziskin and Alvin Sargent and stars Dustin Hoffman, Geena Davis, Andy García, Joan Cusack and Chevy Chase (uncredited). Following the critically acclaimed "The Grifters" (1990), it was the second American feature film by British filmmaker Frears. Bernie LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman) is a pickpocket and petty criminal who anonymously rescues survivors including TV reporter Gale Gayley (Geena Davis) at an airplane crash. His