The performance Richard Dreyfuss loathed for 20 years: “I realised I was nuts”
There’s an argument to be made that Steven Spielberg wouldn’t be the juggernaut he is today without Richard Dreyfuss.
Two of the director’s earliest hits, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, feature the actor in prominent roles, which find Dreyfuss playing shark expert Hooper and UFO chaser Roy, respectively, helping to bring to life two stories that would define the highest-grossing director of all time.
While it might seem easy to just write Dreyfuss off as a Spielberg-centric performer, his career beyond is equally impressive, where his Oscar-winning performance in The Goodbye Girl was a finely tuned mixture of acerbic and sympathetic, no doubt a product of the outspoken actor’s personality. As his career continued to expand, he took on more and more varied and acclaimed roles, still acting today, having appeared in a 2024 biopic about Marlon Brando as the star’s accountant.
Before he really hit the big time, Dreyfuss appeared in a number of lower-profile but still high-quality triumphs, the first of which came in 1974, when he played the title character in the wonderfully titled The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Directed by Ted Kotcheff, who would later find success with First Blood and Weekend at Bernie’s, the film followed the unscrupulous Kravitz in his many attempts to earn a quick buck; actually, that should be a ‘quick loonie’, as it’s set in Canada after all.
The film wasn’t much of a commercial success, not by mainstream standards anyway, but was a big hit with the critics. It won the ‘Film of the Year’ prize at the Canadian Film Awards, and was even nominated for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ at the Oscars. Unfortunately, one person who wasn’t so keen at first was its star, as Dreyfuss explained to The Guardian, “When it first came out, I hated my performance, and said so for 20 years. Then I realised I was just nuts, and I stopped”.
It’s hard to watch the movie and understand what Dreyfuss was thinking, harbouring this attitude. His performance as the brash, determined, poverty-stricken youngster is exactly what you would want. He’s hardly likeable, but his quest to lift himself out of the gutter and prove his doubting family wrong is conveyed in an extremely relatable way. While all actors display perfectionist tendencies, Dreyfuss is downright obsessed with his performances, which might explain why he was so critical of one of his earliest leading roles.
In the end, however, his unwarranted negativity ended up having a life-changing knock-on effect, as while making Dudley Kravitz, he was contacted several times about playing Hooper in Jaws, turning it down several times until he saw the final cut of his upcoming release. Horrified at the sight of his ‘subpar’ performance, Dreyfuss decided he needed to be in something else quickly, to wipe his so-called ‘failure’ from the minds of audiences. He took the job on the shark movie, and the rest is history.
So there you have it. Sometimes it does pay to be overly critical of oneself, although, given how much Dreyfuss hated working on Jaws, he probably wishes he hadn’t acted so hastily.
