No stranger to disguise, Dustin Hoffman – who 30 years ago dressed in drag for Tootsie – cloaked himself in secrecy to hide an unforgiving disease that almost claimed his life.
In 2013, the Rain Man actor – 75 at the time – revealed he secretly underwent treatment for throat cancer, which was “surgically cured,” but he never spoke of it again.
In 1967, a 30-year-old Dustin Hoffman had his breakthrough role in the romantic comedy The Graduate, a film that earned the actor his first Oscar nomination.
Over the next several years, Hoffman appeared in classic films like All the President’s Men (1976) and 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer, where he took home an Academy Award for Best Actor.
In 1983, the California-born man then starred in the film Tootsie, where he played a dried-up actor who dresses up as a woman to land a role on a soap opera.
The hit film, where in drag he was being called a “nottie” instead of a “hottie,” brought him to tears, he said.
“If I was going to be a woman, I would want to be as beautiful as possible, and they said to me, ‘That’s as good as it gets.’ Uh, that’s as beautiful as we can get you,” Hoffman recalled in an interview.
When he heard that he wasn’t very pretty, the now 86-year-old man had an epiphany, forever changing how he treats women.
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“I went home and started crying,” Hoffman says. “I think I’m an interesting woman, when I look at myself on-screen, and I know that if I met myself at a party I would never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill, physically, the demands that we’re brought up to think women have to have in order for us to ask them out.”
Though the comedy was the second highest grossing film of that year – E.T. The Extraterrestrial landed the top spot – Hoffman didn’t think it was funny.
He adds: “…that was never a comedy for me.”
But Hoffman became one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actors.
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