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 star status and his first Academy Award nomination. He then acted in the play "Jimmy Shine" as the eponymous character and the comedy film "Madigan's Millions" (both 1968). In 1969, he starred alongside Jon Voight in the Academy Award for Best Picture winner "Midnight Cowboy", which Hoffman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor a second time. The 1970s saw Hoffman star in several critically acclaimed and commercially successful films, including the Western "Little Big Man" (1970), psychological thriller "Straw Dogs" (1971), prison film "Papillon" (1973) alongside Steve McQueen, "Lenny" (1974) about the controversial comedian Lenny Bruce, and