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 filmography the political thriller "All the President's Men" (1976) as journalist Carl Bernstein investigating the Watergate scandal alongside Bob Woodward (played by Robert Redford). After starring in the suspense-thriller "Marathon Man" (1976) and the crime drama "Straight Time" (1978), Hoffman starred in the 1979 drama "Kramer vs. Kramer", which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the first time for his performance as Ted Kramer. After a three-year acting hiatus, he starred in the comedy "Tootsie" in 1982 as a struggling actor who pretends to be a woman in order to get an acting role. He returned to stage