“One of the greatest actors”: The actor Steven Spielberg believes is a generational talent
As one of the biggest directors in the business, Steven Spielberg has the luxury of picking his collaborators almost at will. Few actors would turn down the opportunity to work with one of Hollywood’s all-time greats.
The three-time Academy Award winner has worked with plenty of the brightest shining stars in the business as a result, but he’s always favoured choosing the best person for the part as opposed to simply hiring a big name because they’ll look good on the poster.
With almost 50 years of filmmaking under his belt, the vast array of multi-generational icons Spielberg has cast over the decades is staggering. Christopher Lee, Toshiro Mifune, Harrison Ford, Christian Bale, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Sean Connery, and Daniel Day-Lewis are just a very small few of them, but they weren’t who he singled out as being a generational talent.
In a 1985 interview with Rolling Stone, the filmmaker was asked if there were any names he hadn’t partnered up with that were on his must-have list, and he got there eventually. “I’ve got to work with Dustin Hoffman,” he said. “I think he’s one of the greatest actors working in America in many decades, not unlike the best of Spencer Tracy in the 1930s and 1940s.”
Several years after that, Spielberg came agonisingly close to getting his wish when he was lined up to helm Rain Man, which ended up winning Hoffman an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’. The director rued the day he was forced to depart the project due to his pre-existing commitments to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but at least he received his wish in the end.
Even though filming didn’t begin until April 1991, Hoffman had signed on to play the titular villain in the revisionist fantasy adventure Hook as far back as 1985, so Spielberg had plenty of time to prepare himself for being on the same set as somebody who’d reached the top of his professional wish-list.
The downside of the pairing finally coming to fruition was that the director was left disappointed by the end result, conceding that Hook didn’t turn out quite the way he wanted. Not that audiences were in agreement after it cleared $300 million at the global box office, and it continues to endure as a firm favourite in his filmography to his day.
Hoffman earned a Golden Globe nomination in the ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’ category for his end of the bargain, so while Spielberg wasn’t overly thrilled with how the production came together, there’s a whole lot of viewers who’ve spent more than 30 years being grateful for the fact he managed to tick the legendary actor off his bucket list.
