Dustin Hoffman

Dustin Hoffman is an American actor whose six-decade career has produced two Best Actor Academy Awards (1980 and 1989) and multiple American film performances across the late 1960s through the 2010s. He was born Dustin Lee Hoffman on August 8, 1937, in Los Angeles, California, into a Jewish-American family. He attended Santa Monica College and the Pasadena Playhouse before relocating to New York to study at the Actors Studio in the late 1950s.

His breakthrough came in Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967), where his portrayal of recent college graduate Benjamin Braddock — opposite Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson and Katharine Ross's Elaine Robinson — became one of the most-iconic American film performances of the late 1960s. The film was the highest-grossing American film of 1967 and earned Hoffman the first of his seven career Best Actor Oscar nominations.

His subsequent peak roles included John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969, opposite Jon Voight, the first X-rated film to win the Best Picture Oscar), Little Big Man (1970), Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), Lenny (1974, in which he played comedian Lenny Bruce), Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men (1976, opposite Robert Redford), and Marathon Man (1976). His first Best Actor Oscar came for Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer (1979); his second for Barry Levinson's Rain Man (1988, opposite Tom Cruise — in which he played the autistic-savant Raymond Babbitt).

Other major roles included Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (1982, opposite Jessica Lange), Hook (1991, in which he played Captain Hook opposite Robin Williams's Peter Pan), Wag the Dog (1997, opposite Robert De Niro), and Last Chance Harvey (2008, opposite Emma Thompson). His career was complicated by 2017 sexual-harassment allegations from multiple women — accusations he initially apologized for and later denied. He has been married to Lisa Gottsegen since 1980, and the couple has four children.

His name Dustin is from the Old Norse Þorsteinn, composed of Thor (the Norse god of thunder) and steinn (stone) — yielding "Thor's stone." Dustin has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for decades.