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 Heat of the Night". Although "Life" magazine joked that "if Dustin Hoffman's face were his fortune, he'd be committed to a life of poverty", "The Graduate" was a gigantic box-office hit for Embassy Pictures, making Hoffman a major new star at the same time. The film received near-unanimous good reviews. "Time" magazine called Hoffman "a symbol of youth" who represented "a new breed of actors." The film's screenwriter, Buck Henry, notes that Hoffman's character made conventional good looks no longer necessary on screen: Hoffman biographer Jeff Lenburg adds that "newspapers across the country were deluged with thousands of letters from