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
Agatha (film) Agatha (film) Agatha is a 1979 British drama thriller film directed by Michael Apted, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Dustin Hoffman and Timothy Dalton, and written by Kathleen Tynan. The "Technovision" film focuses on renowned crime writer Agatha Christie's famous 11-day disappearance in 1926. The film opens as Agatha Christie (Vanessa Redgrave) gets a silver cup engraved for her husband Archie (Timothy Dalton), who receives the gift with utter disdain. The couple walks to a publicity event for Agatha's new novel, "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd". They are tailed into the venue by American reporter Wally Stanton (Dustin Hoffman). The next morning,