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 to Hoffman's career: "In "The Graduate", he created a lasting resonance as Ben Braddock that made him an overnight sensation and set him on the road to becoming one of our biggest stars and most respected actors." Hoffman, however, mostly credits director Mike Nichols for taking a great risk in giving him, a relative unknown, the starring role: "I don't know of another instance of a director at the height of his powers who would take a chance and cast someone like me in that part. It took tremendous courage." Critic Sam Kashner observed strong similarities between Hoffman's character and