Dustin Hoffman Took Acting Class Because 'Nobody Flunks' — It Led to Two Oscars

Dustin Hoffman, the two-time Academy Award winner, enrolled in his first acting class because a friend promised it was impossible to fail. "My friend said, 'Take acting, it's like gym. Nobody flunks. You know, the worst you can get in gym is a C,'" Hoffman recounted to Willie Geist, host of Sunday Sitdown, in an interview about his new memoir, "Look at Me."

The revelation appears in Hoffman's conversation with Geist, which revisits the unlikely origins of one of Hollywood's most decorated careers. What began as a route to a passing grade became, in Hoffman's telling, an absorption unlike anything he had known.

What changed for the young Hoffman?

"And I took this acting class because I would get a C. And suddenly, I have to do a scene. And I have to memorize it. And I am lost in time," he said. The contrast with his childhood piano lessons was stark. "When I practiced the piano — it was a clock, and I had to at least spend an hour a day, you know, practicing. And it was always by that clock and I hated it," Hoffman recalled.

Acting dissolved that clock entirely. "Anybody who loves their work — the clock does not exist," he told Geist.

From a C-seeking student to Benjamin Braddock

The breakthrough came in 1967. Hoffman starred as Benjamin Braddock in "The Graduate," playing a recent college graduate adrift in adult life, and the role launched him into stardom and established him as a leading Hollywood actor.

The filmography that followed spans a striking range of characters:

• Journalist Carl Bernstein opposite Robert Redford in "All the President's Men"
• An actor disguised as a woman in the comedy "Tootsie"
• The villainous Captain Hook in Steven Spielberg's "Hook"

The industry's highest honors followed. Hoffman won his first Academy Award for best actor for the 1979 drama "Kramer vs. Kramer," and a second for his performance opposite Tom Cruise in the 1988 film "Rain Man."

What does an 89-year-old Hoffman do next?

He keeps going. Now 89, Hoffman suggests his memoir is not a closing statement. "I exercise. I have an extraordinary marriage, extraordinary children, which not everybody has," he told Geist. "And I have all these things going, so death better watch out."

"Look at Me" arrives as the record of a career that began with a friend's advice about gym-class grading. It closes, at least for now, with an actor who says the clock still has not caught up with him.