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 In 1967, immediately after wrapping up principal filming on "The Tiger Makes Out", Hoffman flew from New York City to Fargo, North Dakota, where he directed productions of William Gibson's "Two for the Seesaw" and William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life" for the Fargo-Moorhead Community Theatre. The $1,000 he received for the eight-week contract was all he had to hold him over until the funds from the movie materialized. In 1966 director Mike Nichols auditioned Hoffman for a lead role in the Broadway musical "The Apple Tree" but rejected him because he could not sing well enough and gave