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
Philip Seymour Hoffman by the Screen Actors Guild. On stage in 2009, Hoffman played Iago in Peter Sellars' futuristic production of "Othello" (with the title role by John Ortiz), which received mixed reviews. Ben Brantley, theatre critic of "The New York Times", found it to be "exasperatingly misconceived", remarking that even when Hoffman is attempting to "manipulate others into self-destruction, he comes close to spoiling everything by erupting into genuine, volcanic fury". Hoffman also did his first vocal performance for the claymation film "Mary and Max", although the film did not initially have an American release. He played Max, a depressed New Yorker