There’s a fascinating interview with Dustin Hoffman in today’s Sunday Times. It’s hard to imagine one of cinema’s greatest ever actors regretting much about his career (Ishtar excepted, natch) but Hoffman admits his regret at turning down the chance to work with Federico Fellini:
“I turned him down? To look back now and think I could have spent three months with one of the great – I don’t want to start crying here – but one of the greatest film artists of all time? I don’t care if he was doing doo-doo for 12 hours every day.”
It seems that Hoffman – like so many of the best actors – is driven by a personal fear of failure. Suffused with that fear, the conclusion of the interview (with Ariel Leve) is lovely:
“Someone once said to me, ‘Some of us choose to live with a lifeboat just a little bit out of our reach.’ I’d like to reach a point where I no longer bullshit myself. I think that’s the natural human condition – to lie to yourself. Because the truth is painful.”
A wonderful actor who latterly has developed a knack for making films that are far more interesting than what he is being offered, yet which very few people go to see: Hero, American Buffalo, Mad City, Wag the Dog, I Heart Huckabees, Stranger than Fiction. In that same period, he has acted in only 2 outright blockbusters: Outbreak and Meet the Fockers.
The article suggests that he is frightened of the “great roles”, and we can imagine him as both Stern in Schindler’s List and Neary in Close Encounters (he was also offered the part of John Rambo in First Blood, which would have made that franchise very interesting), but at the beginning of his career, when he took lead roles, he made interesting characters out of them – The Graduate, Marathon Man, Straw Dogs and Little Big Man – to compensate for his lack of “leading man” status. An excellent actor and a very original star.