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 Hoffman then studied at Actors Studio and became a dedicated method actor. Sidney W. Pink, a producer and 3D-movie pioneer, discovered him in one of his off-Broadway roles and cast him in "Madigan's Millions". Through the early and mid-1960s, Hoffman made appearances in television shows and movies, including "Naked City", "The Defenders" and "Hallmark Hall of Fame". His first critical success was in the play "Eh?", by Henry Livings, which had its U.S. premiere at the Circle in the Square Downtown on October 16, 1966. Hoffman made his film debut in "The Tiger Makes Out" in 1967, alongside Eli Wallach.