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 of No. 27 Hero on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains list, while "Entertainment Weekly" ranked "All the President's Men" as one of the 25 "Powerful Political Thrillers". Hoffman next starred in "Marathon Man" (1976), a film based on William Goldman's novel of the same name, opposite Laurence Olivier and Roy Scheider. Its director, John Schlesinger also directed Hoffman in "Midnight Cowboy" in 1969. Described as "Schlesinger's thriller," by author Gene D. Phillips, Hoffman plays the hero, Babe Levy, a part-time long-distance runner and graduate student, who suddenly finds himself being pursued by a fugitive Nazi. To put himself