Introspective and at ease

The sun has moved west along San Vicente Boulevard, and the light in the actor’s Brentwood office is stretched thin and pale. The actor has been talking for a long time and though he isn’t finished, he is a little tired. Leaning sideways in a leather smoking chair, he is almost horizontal, legs straight out, the unmistakable profile limned against the fading light. Perfectly, as if according to a stage direction.

“At a certain point,” he says, “your life becomes a fiction. People talk about my ‘body of work,’ and I don’t know what that means. I know there were moments, I have a body of moments, but I don’t know what they add up to.”

He shifts in his chair; what began as a two-hour interview has evolved into two six-hour days of conversation. The sound of the traffic scoots in through the small silence; from the next room the voice of an assistant murmurs into a phone.

“I never knew what it felt like to have an identity until I took on a character,” he says. “And in between ... “ His voice trails off. “I guess I would call it an ache now,” he says. “Then, I didn’t know what it was. It was life. It was my life.”

This actor has been famous for a very long time. Not because he is sensational or notorious or ubiquitous but because he is extremely good at what he does. Which is find the pain and hope of a character and embody them. So the audience can find them too.

There is irrefutable proof that he is good at this -- reviews, nominations, awards, big paychecks, the respect of colleagues, the admiration of audiences, the envy of thousands of actors who would kill to be able to do what he does.

But none of that matters. Or at least not much.

“Fame ain’t going to cure the pain,” he says. “When you get famous, people change, you change, your family changes. People want to be part of it, what they imagine it feels like. I look at Bruce Willis,” he says, “walking down the street in shorts with that cigar, or George Clooney, and I think, ‘Of course people want to feel like that. I want to feel like that. What does that feel like?’ ”

Then Dustin Hoffman sits up straight and laughs. After several years of self-imposed semi-exile, he has returned to the business of making movies. All sorts of movies in all sorts of roles -- from “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” to “Meet the Fockers,” from “Finding Neverland” to “I {heart} Huckabees.” No longer does he say “no” because the script isn’t perfect or the role isn’t big enough or he can’t choose his own cinematographer. He plays gangster Meyer Lansky in Andy Garcia’s pet project “The Lost City.” Now he is preparing to become an obsessive English professor opposite Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson in “Stranger Than Fiction.”

In all these performances, the intensity that marked his early years burns still, but something is different -- a playfulness, an ease. For the first time in a four-decade-long career, the 67-year-old actor seems at home in his skin. His own skin.

“In the last few years there has been less pain,” he says. “My family has noticed it. I have noticed it. I’m still working on it, though.”

Like every performance he has given, this has not come easily. It has taken years of therapy, of dismantling his own mythology. From the moment he appeared as Benjamin Braddock in “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman was the accidental movie star -- the short, big-nosed actor who, in his own words, “plummeted to stardom.”

But beneath the myth lay a personal truth that was not so uplifting.

“I was not supposed to succeed,” Hoffman says, and it sounds less like a punch line, more like a confession. Because for the last few years, the actor has turned his famous need for tenacious research onto a new character: himself.

“It’s only lately, in the last few years, that ‘I am’ has started to happen,” he says, trying at last to explain the change that is visible in his joyful performance as Bernie Focker and his oddly wise existential detective in “Huckabees.” “Only lately that it’s started to be enough. ‘I am allowed. I am allowed a life.’ Before that I never thought I was interesting enough as is. Other people were, but me,” he says, with a grin, “I had to work for a living.”

A HOME, NOT A STAGE

In Hoffman’s house, the guinea pigs are singing. Three in a row, their cages the size of dollhouses and filled with shreds of chard and carrots. They raise their furry heads in a chirping, plaintive chorus as Hoffman reaches into the vegetable drawer of his refrigerator and rustles a plastic bag to prove the Pavlovian rule.

“I am trying to kill them by overeating,” he says. “But they just get fatter and happier.”

The kitchen smells pleasantly of wood smoke, because there is a fire burning in the fireplace, and of flowers, because they are scattered about in well-groomed bouquets. The house is in a Westside neighborhood that the actor’s publicist would rather not be named, and it is remarkable not for its size -- it’s big, but for a movie star, not so big -- or its obligatory accessories -- screening room, tennis court, lap pool, public-park-size gardens and lawns -- but for its actual homeyness.

People live here, children were raised here, and it shows. In the messy stacks of papers and notebooks on the coffee table, the jars of candy, the pool table in the next room, the two dogs clearly accustomed to continual belly rubs. Certainly in the framed photographs that forest tables and shelves everywhere, most of dark-eyed, dark-haired children on their journeys to and through young adulthood -- Hoffman recently became a first-time grandfather.

“Remnants,” he says, glancing at a bowl of cashews, a spill of sunglasses. “The last one graduates high school in two months. But 35 years of parenting ... “ Hoffman smiles that familiar but still surprising smile and shrugs, “there are remnants.”

Parenthood echoes in his demeanor as well. A bossy solicitousness -- “Do you need sunscreen? We have sunscreen somewhere. You’re not going to eat? You need to eat” -- surfaces in his conversations with all manner of people. In the middle of business with staff, reporters, photographers, his publicist, whomever, Hoffman is the sort of man who will interrupt himself to ask if the person sitting next to him has to go to the bathroom.

Today the business is talking about why he went almost four years without making a film -- besides a small role in “The Messenger,” which he took, he says, “because it meant a lot of money and I could bring my daughter to Paris,” and why, since he began again, he seems different. As if he’s finally having some fun.

“You think so? Fun?” He frowns. “I don’t know.... There is fun, but it’s always a lot of work. Fun takes a lot of work.”

Comfortable, then. Comfortable with himself. The frown smooths itself out. “That, yeah, that could be right. That would make sense.”

Sitting gingerly -- he recently wrenched his back -- at a table on the patio behind his house, Hoffman begins to explain. At first, the story of what happened during the years between “Sphere” in 1998 and “Moonlight Mile” in 2002 begins as smooth and polished as a monologue: He had not felt good about the work on “Sphere,” had noticed that for the first time “in. my. life.” he was approaching each day on the set with nausea and dread, “which I couldn’t understand because it was Barry Levinson and I love Barry Levinson.” Then the American Film Institute asked Hoffman if he would accept a Lifetime Achievement Award.

They had asked before, once, thrice, four times, and each time he refused. He wasn’t dead; maybe he was old but not that old, not old enough to sum up a career. He was about to say no again when a friend called. “He said, ‘You cannot keep refusing this,’ ” Hoffman says. “He said, ‘It’s insulting to these people and insulting to the people who have said yes before you.’ I didn’t want to insult anyone, so I agreed. ‘I’ll take it. Thank you very much.’ Boom.”

He worked on his speech, he invited his family, all the kids came, all his friends came and when he got to the Hilton there was a collage of his work strung across the stage. Very nice. The evening went fine. People said nice things, funny things; Jack Nicholson brought down the house reading a letter from Meryl Streep. Hoffman’s speech went fine. He teared up nicely, and then he and his wife, Lisa, went home “because we never go to parties. We are always so grateful when it’s over.” Lisa went to bed; he went to bed but couldn’t sleep. Could Not Sleep.

“And then I think I had something like a panic attack. My heart was racing, my mind was racing, and it’s not conscious, none of it is conscious, but it was not good.”

“Sphere” did not do well, and Hoffman decided he needed a break. He would write, he would spend time with his children, work on his roses, take a few months off, six months off. A year ... two years

“I started wearing cardigan sweaters,” he says. “My wife says, ‘What is with the cardigan sweaters?’ I’m working on these scripts” -- one an adaptation of Scott Turow’s “Personal Injuries,” the other a project he has been pitching for 10 years called “After You” -- “and it’s going, but it’s hard to get it right. And the scripts that are coming in, well, I didn’t like what I was seeing, and frankly, after a while I wasn’t seeing all that much.”

He places his hands palms-down on the table, smoothing the wood as if it were a tablecloth. “I learned one important thing: If you’re going to take a break, do it after a hit.” He grins. “They forget you soon enough after a hit.”

Finally Lisa told him, as loving spouses are wont to do, that he needed to go back to work. And that perhaps this would be easier if he threw away some of the rules he had stacked around him like a wall. “I had had the luxury of saying only this director and that cinematographer, only if I can work on the script, whatever. But to a certain extent, those were just excuses to say no. My wife said, ‘What are you trying to prove? What else do you think you have to prove? You need to work.’ ”

So he agreed to do “Moonlight Mile,” a film he had previously rejected. He did “Runaway Jury” and had a small role in “Confidence.” Then he began taking roles for the fun of it -- “Neverland” because he wanted to work with Johnny Depp, “Huckabees” because he thought it was such an off-the-wall script.

“Now I am into the ‘yes,’ ” he says, laughing at his New Age-speak. “I decided to be more like Bobby Duvall. He says, ‘I don’t care, I’ll do a walk-on. Just give me the work.’ ”

In reality, Hoffman had been doing more than screenwriting and sweater-wearing during those years. The panic attack had sent him back into therapy, and he was trying to figure out the reasons behind the reasons he had given himself all his life.

“When I looked at all those pictures on that stage that night,” he says, “what I saw were all the things I hadn’t done, bad decisions I had made. Why didn’t I work with Bergman when he asked me to, why hadn’t I worked with Spielberg or Fellini when they asked, why had I done ‘John and Mary’? Well I know why I did ‘John and Mary’ -- because my agent told me if I did it I could afford a town house, and I had never had a town house. I could barely afford an apartment.”

He turned down Fellini, he says, because Fellini dubbed all the voices in the studio “and I didn’t want to do that, but it was Fellini, you know? Why did I really say no? I knew all the reasons I had given myself at the time, and they were legitimate at the time, but they weren’t the real reasons.”

Hoffman pauses. It is an emotional pause, maybe intentional, maybe for effect. With actors it’s sometimes hard to tell. It’s a little past noon on a warm, clear day, and while the high, bright light does not reveal Hoffman’s age -- in full sunlight the man who played 21 at 30 still looks a good 15 years younger than he is -- it does illuminate the lines around the eyes and mouth, lines left by time and effort.

“The reason behind so many of the reasons,” he says, “was four words: ‘I didn’t deserve it.’ ”

MADNESS TO HIS METHOD

The Dustin Hoffman mythology goes something like this: A young man who was a bad student stumbles into an acting class and finds himself. He moves to New York, where he checks coats and obsesses with his actor friends -- Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall -- about how they will never be stars but that’s OK because they will never sell out, always be true to the work.

Along comes “The Graduate,” and suddenly Hoffman is a movie star. He tries to take the sheen off with “Midnight Cowboy” -- “Mike Nichols called me, said ‘What are you doing? You can’t do this. I made you a star!’ ” -- only it backfires, and he is even more famous. But he never abandons his Method tendencies, his quest for perfection, which, the legend would have it, drives many directors and colleagues insane: After “Tootsie” premiered to great acclaim and awards, director Sydney Pollack famously said he would give it all back for the nine months Hoffman took from his life.

Hoffman knows about this reputation, but to him it is a story about another person. “People tell me I have a mythology, and I don’t understand. That I’m ‘intense’? That I’m ‘difficult’? I’m always meeting people who say, ‘Oh, you’re not at all what I thought you would be -- you tell dirty jokes, you don’t scream at people.’ It’s ridiculous. The problem comes when a director says, ‘That’s great,’ and you say it’s not. You say, ‘I can do it better.’ Then you’re telling them they are settling for less than they should, and then you are in deep doo-doo.”

He would also like to point out that the directors who have complained in public -- “and I’m not going to name names because I don’t do that” -- were usually griping about what turned out to be “their best or one of their best films.”

But the mythology also covered deeper hurts. That he had taken an acting class in junior college because, as has been reported endlessly, “someone told me you couldn’t flunk an acting class” does not begin to capture the pain of a boy who began every year with pristine notebooks and the resolution that this year would be different -- no Ds and Fs. Or the regret he still feels over the fact that he never went to college.

“Later I realized that I was capable of learning,” he says. “I could read a play, focus on a play, read Chekhov and Shakespeare and O’Neill and understand. I could understand.

“But then I was convinced,” he says. “I was convinced that I was not intelligent. That was not my place in the family. My brother was the smart one, the A student. I was the problem child.”

He was a sickly baby, he says. “I had so many operations, I almost died. I was always sick. And the stories were always that I was a problem. Because I didn’t listen. I got sick because I didn’t listen. It was not a good time for me. The whole first 18 years.”

Hoffman has talked about his father before, particularly during the years he was working on “Death of a Salesman.” Harvey Hoffman had worked as a successful furniture salesman, although he never considered himself successful, which created an atmosphere of tension in the home. When critics said Hoffman’s performance in “Wag the Dog” was a riff on producer Robert Evans, Hoffman corrected them.

“That was my father,” he said of the imperious megalomaniac he played. Because Harvey had spent years trying to break into show business, working his way up through the prop department at Columbia Studios. But when he made it clear that he wanted to be an assistant director, he was told to get in line, and that was that. He quit and went into sales.

“I still don’t know what happened,” the younger Hoffman says now. “Why he didn’t just try another studio. My father was a very ... “ he searches for a word that is both accurate and still, perhaps, loyal, “ ... aggressive man. It wouldn’t surprise me if something, you know, happened. Something that made it ... impossible for him to go to another studio.”

Although Hoffman says he is more comfortable talking about his parents now that they and most of their friends are dead, there are still lines, and maybe he has crossed one because after a moment, he smiles and tells a story. As if to erase the image of what might have happened.

“When I was shooting ‘The Graduate,’ ” he says in a much lighter tone, “my father wanted on the set. But I was afraid of what he’d say because he was the kind of man who would say anything to anybody. So one day we’re shooting at the Ambassador Hotel, and I figure this is perfect because there’s a big crowd and crowd control and a rope, so I invite my parents.”

After one take, Hoffman went to the bathroom; when he came out, director Nichols was setting up a dolly shot. “They’re laying down the tracks, and I see my father ducking under the rope and walking right up to Mike, and he gets right in his face and says, “No, no, this is what you want to do.”

Hoffman pauses, and this time it is definitely an intentional pause, one that has clearly worked for years. “Giving direction to Mike Nichols. That was my father.”

Hoffman’s father would later try to become his manager (“Thank God I was smart enough to say no”), would make up lists of the roles Hoffman should play, would tell him how to manage his money. On Hoffman’s 50th birthday, he and Harvey went for a walk on the beach. “I’m 50, he’s 80, so I thought this was going to be, you know, a big moment. Finally. And he stops walking and he looks at me and he says, ‘It’s all bullshit,’ and then he walks away. The big gift: ‘It’s all bullshit.’ ”

The son laughs, because with stories like that there is nothing else you can do, especially when you’re telling them to a stranger. But Hoffman has spent enough time in therapy to know now that some of what has pulled at him, made it so difficult for him to be happy with the success, with the money and the fame and the freedom it buys, was the knowledge that he had so outstripped his father.

“They let you know, parents. They want you to succeed, but not so much, and they let you know. I think one of the reasons I haven’t directed yet was because he wanted to be a director, ultimately,” Hoffman says. “Thank God he didn’t want to be an actor. It’s been hard enough. But if he had been an actor? I would have been really screwed then.”

WHEN THE CAMERA’S ON

You would think at this point in his life the man would be used to having his picture taken. But if he is, it doesn’t show. Asked to stand before a camera, Hoffman complies, but he also whimpers. And quips. And calls to his assistant for quotes from e.e. cummings and Arthur Miller. He interviews the photographer -- “Where are you from? When did you know you wanted to be a photographer?” -- tells dirty jokes and grumbles about how much he hates having his picture taken.

The words “intense” and “perfectionist” may still orbit like satellites, but he is also very funny, often in a childlike -- “if you mean childish, say childish,” he chides at one point -- way.

His production company is called Punch -- images of the irrepressible puppet are all over the office -- and his on-set pranks are legendary. The “Finding Neverland” DVD includes him mugging with extras. He kept child actor Justin Henry focused during “Kramer vs. Kramer” by becoming, as Streep put it, “a walking whoopee cushion” of flatulence jokes. And a famous set of outtakes from “Marathon Man” has him mimicking producer Evans even as his character is being drowned in a bathtub.

Which may explain why it is possible to talk with him for hours and not get bored.

The conversation moves from current events -- Hoffman was blown away by the early interview with Atlanta hostage Ashley Smith about how she survived her mid-March abduction by Brian Nichols -- to politics -- “I always imagine a politician’s life is similar to an actor’s: You get up, work out, get into the makeup chair” -- to the narcissism of celebrity -- “We are all movie stars when we’re babies; it’s just really hard for most of us to accept that you can’t get that back.”

It’s easy to see the actor who researched autism for two years before “Rain Man,” who had himself smuggled onto Rikers Island before “Straight Time.” He does not give up until he thinks he has given the absolute best answer, even if it means consulting a dictionary for the precise word.

“I don’t give short answers,” he says early on, as if by disclaimer. “I don’t know how to give short answers.”

He has a digressive mind, and part of it is because he has so many stories -- great stories about Laurence Olivier and Miller, Nichols and John Schlesinger, about the early days with Hackman and Duvall, the exquisite agony of being a struggling actor in New York in the 1960s.

“I remember walking through Central Park and seeing a Broadway Show League game -- you know, the softball league,” he says. “All I wanted was to be in the Broadway Show League, with a baseball jacket with ‘Gypsy’ on it -- even a walk-on part, that was making it. Anyway, there was Paul Newman in the outfield, and my mouth drops open and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, there’s Paul Newman.’ So the batter hits a fly ball, an easy fly, high and slow, and Newman is right under it, such an easy play, and the ball falls right between Paul Newman’s hand and his glove.” Hoffman laughs out loud. “It made my day. It made my week. They’re human. The relief.”

And he is happy to dish on the serendipity that can turn a good performance into a great one. “Before we shot the hotel scene in ‘The Graduate,’ Mike Nichols asked me about the first time I touched a woman’s breast.” Hoffman relates a complicated story that winds up with him unable to kiss the girl -- she’s in full makeup -- so he just reaches out and puts his hand on her breast. “So Mike says, ‘Do that.’ And I do and it’s brilliant, but Anne Bancroft is even more brilliant because she just sits there, cleaning her sweater. Doesn’t even acknowledge it. And in rehearsal I think I’m going to break up laughing, so after a minute I walk away, keeping my back to the camera because I’m laughing, and I just lean against the wall and start banging my head against it. All of which is in the film.”

When you’ve been in the movie business for 40-odd years, you will have a lot of stories. And if you are a movie star, you will be used to telling them because there will always be people willing to listen. But it’s more than just the stories that holds a listener’s attention; it’s the image of a man who is, after all this time, still truly curious about life.

“People are still surprised, and it’s really irritating after 40 years in the business, that I want to do the research,” he says. “But that’s the fun of it. That’s the best part of the job -- learning. If you’re not still learning, if you don’t still feel like a rank amateur, then you’re not doing it right.”

And he is still learning, only now, in addition to figuring out the literature professor, the gentlemanly gangster, Hoffman is trying to figure out the 67-year-old actor who had a panic attack when he won an award.

“I’ll tell you a story,” he says, trying again to explain what has happened, what is different now. A director Hoffman worked with received copious notes from studio heads on a film he was happy with. Notes demanding all sorts of changes. But the director didn’t argue, didn’t get angry, he simply smiled and said, “It’s your film. You do what you think is best. Just take my name off it.”

(The studio withdrew its notes, and the film went on to be nominated for several Oscars including best picture.)

When the director told Hoffman what had happened, the actor was flabbergasted. “I said, ‘How can you do that? Your work, that’s your work. How could you just turn it over?’ And he said, ‘Yes, but that is not who I am. My work is not my identity. I am my identity.’ ”

Hoffman shakes his head. “This guy’s a kid, and he knows already what it’s taken me years to almost learn. That I am not my work.”

THE SCHNOZZOLA EFFECT

On April 18, Hoffman will be honored at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual gala tribute -- essentially another lifetime achievement award.

For the last month, Lisa has been checking in to make sure that things are, well, OK. “She reminds me,” he says, laughing. “She says, ‘Now, remember, you’re going to get this thing and you’re feeling good about it, right?’ And it’s fine, it really is. Because I don’t have to go back. I’ve done a lot of the [psychological] work. Not all of it, but a lot.”

The difference now lies between deed and essence, between what this man has done, which is make a lot of good -- and some not-so-good -- movies, and who he is, which is an actor. A fate that was sealed long before that junior college acting class.

“For years I was going to be a musician,” Hoffman says. “Play the piano. At parties I would always sit at the piano and leave a little room in case a girl would sit down. Not that I could ever bring myself to talk to a girl.”

But he gave up that goal because being a musician meant spending hours practicing. Alone. “I did not want to be alone,” he says. “Acting requires other people.”

When he was 13 or 14, he had to give an oral book report in class. He chose a biography of Jimmy Durante, mainly because it was the only book that didn’t completely intimidate him.

As a child, Hoffman loved Durante, partly because of the nose and partly because he was so utterly unlikely. “He couldn’t sing but he sang, he couldn’t dance but he danced, his jokes were so corny but he was hilarious,” Hoffman says. “Because he was magical.”

Young Dusty stood in his eighth-grade class reading his report about Durante, and when he got to the description of how kids teased the young “Schnozzola,” he broke down. For years he remembered this as one of those mortifying childhood events, until one day he remembered it differently.

“I realized this was the first time I revealed someone who wasn’t me but was me,” he says. He grins, but this time the smile has to push something back. “Connecting with someone else’s pain became my pain. I could relate that [pain], and it stuck.”

No one does pain like Dustin Hoffman. Benjamin Braddock, Ratso Rizzo, Lenny Bruce, Michael Dorsey, Willy Loman, Raymond Babbitt, even Capt. Hook -- Hoffman has built a career by finding the pain behind the anger, behind the ennui, the fear, the distance, the ambition. And that ability has not changed, but perhaps the necessity of it has.

Hoffman talks a lot about the early days, maybe because he likes remembering a time when there were no conflicts between the work and money or the work and raising the profile, because there was no money, there was no profile. Or maybe because, as with many people, the memories of young adulthood -- those first years of independence -- remain the most vivid.

“When I couldn’t get work as an actor,” he says, “someone would say, ‘Do you want to be assistant director?’ and I would say ‘yes’ and I would put the scripts out and the pencils beside them, and I would sit in the room and listen and it was so real.... “

Here his voice stops, his lips purse and the tears rise, and he makes no move to stop them. “That was where I felt better, the only place I felt better. In that room, being around that work.” His fists clench tight against his sides. He pauses, swallows, but still his voice is tight.

“They could take away everything, they could take away this,” he motions to the pool, the pool house, the languid wisteria, the green green grass, “and I would miss this, don’t get me wrong, this is nice, but they cannot take that. They cannot take that. Because that is what there is for me.”

The sun falls golden on the actor, filtered through the trees as if scripted. It is an emotional moment, coming almost out of nowhere but maybe not. Hoffman’s words are utterly believable and, more than that, universal -- surely there is something every person feels this strongly about, some inner need or drive that cannot be reduced.

In the backyard of this lovely home, with the perfect light and a breeze blowing through the wisteria, the scene is slightly unreal. Here is a movie star; this is an interview. He may well be giving a speech he has given many times, to many people. But none of that matters. Or at least not much. Because this is what Dustin Hoffman does -- make the amorphous real, real enough so that you feel it too.

Still working for a living. After all these years.

Contact Mary McNamara at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.