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STEVE KROFT: It's not easy to think of another actor who has made more great movies or made more movies great. And as we sat in a screening room a few weeks ago, making him look at clips, Dustin Hoffman said it was like going through an old family album.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: I don't know about you, but when you go back and look at early photographs of yourself or your family and your kids are grown, it's sweet stuff and it's painful stuff. Isn't it? Where did it go? Where did it go? And that's a similar feeling.

STEVE KROFT: It's a career no-one would have predicted, including himself, when he left his hometown of Los Angeles 46 years ago and went to New York to become an actor. He was short, scrawny with a big nose and not in immediate demand and it didn't seem to bother him.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: I was prepared for failure. In a sense, I was seeking failure, because failure meant you weren't selling out — in those days.

STEVE KROFT: He shared apartments with a couple of other struggling young actors — Gene Hackman and Robert Duval.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: If God had reached down and said, "Sign on the dotted line and you guys will never be out of work, you'll only have supporting parts off-Broadway for the rest of your life," we would have signed like that, to have ... all you wanted is to be employed. You want to practice your craft every day.

STEVE KROFT: He took acting classes, bought his clothes at the Salvation Army and dined on a steady diet of rejection. Trailing a crowd of admirers, he showed us where he had his first gig on Broadway, working in the kitchen.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Well, I worked here.

STEVE KROFT: Right here?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Yeah, I worked at Howard Johnson's.

STEVE KROFT: And what did you do here?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: I lasted a week.

STEVE KROFT: Do you remember what it was, the guy who fired you?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Yes, I didn't fit in.

STEVE KROFT: Not fitting in has been a dominant theme in Hoffman's life, in fact, it has always been part of his appeal. And despite the adversity, he was not about to give up.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: You cannot be in this because you think you're going to make a living at it, you can only be in this because it's the only way you choose to survive.

STEVE KROFT: It took him 10 years, but he eventually built a reputation performing off-Broadway, winning awards and good notices, one of which caught the eye of director Mike Nichols who was casting a new movie in 1967. The role of Benjamin Braddock was written for someone tall, blonde and athletic. But Nichols saw something in the obscure total unknown and cast him against type as a neurotic bumbling basket-case who is seduced by one of his mother's friends. Hoffman had no idea what was about to happen to him. All he remembers is going to a sneak preview and seeing himself on film for the first time.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: I had a panic attack and I started … my teeth started to chatter so that people could hear it and they would kind of be going like that. It was just terrifying experience for me. It wasn't fun. It wasn't fun.

STEVE KROFT: He waited for everyone to leave the theatre, but in the lobby, he ran into a famous gossip columnist.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: And she points her cane at me — it's right out of Dickens — she's holding onto the rail and she says "You're Dustin Hoffman, aren't you?" And she says like this, she says "Your life will never be the same".

STEVE KROFT: She was right?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: I guess, yeah.

STEVE KROFT: He earned his first Academy Award nomination for The Graduate but only made $17,000 and was back on the unemployment line by the time Life magazine came around to do a feature. Women were lining up outside his apartment. And he had to get a new telephone number.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: I wasn't very happy.

STEVE KROFT: Why?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: My plan wasn't working out.

STEVE KROFT: Your plan to be an obscure, committed artist?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Yes.

STEVE KROFT: Did you get a lot of offers immediately for other films?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Yes, and I turned every one of them down. I didn't work for a year. Finally I got a script called Midnight Cowboy.

STEVE KROFT: Everyone told him not to do it. It was a dark film and a supporting role. And what's more, the director, John Schlesinger, didn't want any part of him, couldn't see the preppy nebbish from The Graduate playing the tubercular, homeless Ratso Rizzo, but Hoffman prevailed.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: What fuelled me then and what fuels me now is, "Oh you don't think I'm any good?"

STEVE KROFT: Right.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: "You don't think I can do that?"

STEVE KROFT: It provides your motivation.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Revenge.

STEVE KROFT: Revenge?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: There ain't nothing wrong with it. I don't think I can walk anymore.

STEVE KROFT: He once said that movies are like life — everything depends on a few decisions you make at the very beginning and Hoffman had set his course, making a career playing outsiders, underdogs and anti-heroes. In 1979, he brought his own personal anguish to the screen, winning his first Oscar for Kramer vs Kramer as his first marriage was breaking up.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: I was supposed to say "God damn it", and I said "God damn her". That was the moment. That came to me because that's the truth — God damn her. Because that's what each party does, they cannot look at themselves in terms of the failure of it. It's the other one.

STEVE KROFT: Gene Hackman, Hoffman's old roommate, has known him for more than 40 years, through thick and thin.

GENE HACKMAN: He really is the best of the kind of really tough actors.

STEVE KROFT: When you say tough, what do you mean?

GENE HACKMAN: I mean tough, tough minded, tough ... gets what he wants.

STEVE KROFT: It's a trait Hoffman says he picked up during the early days in New York.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: We belonged to a small tribe of ... that. That was one of the greatest gifts of being an actor. You could walk. You know what I mean? No-one could take your freedom away.

STEVE KROFT: Did you walk a lot?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: A lot.

STEVE KROFT: How do you get away with that as a young actor without being permanently labelled as a pain in the butt?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Well, that was Tootsie, wasn't it?

STEVE KROFT: In fact, the character Hoffman plays in Tootsie is said to be a parody of Hoffman himself. You like to have control.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: I'm the artist. I'm the artist. I know actors who say, "I am putty for the director, I am there to fulfil the director's vision." And I say, "It depends."

STEVE KROFT: For all of his success, Hoffman doesn't rest easy. He's still dogged by his early insecurities and still worries that each movie might be his last. You still worry about failure?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Yeah, failure is there every minute of your life.

STEVE KROFT: You have had one of the most successful careers in the history of Hollywood.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Okay, can I ask you a question? Who do you think is the most successful director in the last few years?

STEVE KROFT: Spielberg.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Spielberg. You know what Spielberg told me? On the first day of shooting he throws up on his way to work.

STEVE KROFT: Hoffman also dreads boredom. We'd been planning to go to his beach house in Malibu, so for the drive, we decided to have some fun and surprise him.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: That's what I drove, is that the Alfa Romeo?

STEVE KROFT: That's the same year, the same model.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Well, they called them "The Graduate" afterwards. I haven't seen one like ... wow.

STEVE KROFT: Seeing the car immediately jogged his memory. He had done his own driving in the movie and while he was hurtling along the twisting roads of the coastal highway, the film crew in the helicopter kept screaming at him to go faster.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Instead of going 50 miles an hour, which I'm doing now, they kept telling me, don't let a car pass you, you're in a hurry to stop the wedding. Well there was a couple of times I almost bought the ranch. It's interesting because I haven't driven this car since I made the movie, since 1967. And that's, what, 37 years ago and it does make me feel younger. I feel, you know, 62, 63.

STEVE KROFT: You're 67, right?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: God knows.

STEVE KROFT: Do you feel 67?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Yes.

STEVE KROFT: Do you?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Oh, yeah. In one sense.

STEVE KROFT: What sense?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: I can see the end of the tunnel. That's alright. I would like to be courageous enough to take my audience along with me in an honest fashion.

STEVE KROFT: That means playing closer to his age and taking more supporting parts, like his role in Meet the Fockers in which he joins Barbra Streisand and Robert De Niro in the sequel to Meet the Parents. He's been married to his second wife for 24 years, has six children and two dogs. It's not the life he dreamed of almost 50 years ago — steady work off-Broadway in supporting roles. That didn't work out. But he seems okay with it. This is stardom. This is what stardom gets you. This is pretty good.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Yes, yes, yes.

STEVE KROFT: And you appreciate it?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: I'm trying. Is there anything that you haven't done that you want to do?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Yes.

STEVE KROFT: What?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Everything I haven't done.

STEVE KROFT: One thing he hasn't done is direct. Right now, he's working on a film adaptation of Scott Turow's Personal Injuries which he plans to direct, produce and star in. So he's not ready to leave the stage just yet, although he loves thinking ahead to what will be his final exit line.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: I hear things, they come to me and I say "That's what I want on my tombstone". One is, "I knew this was going to happen". That's a good one. And I thought one up the other day which is now one of my favourites. I want my tombstone to say, "I'd like to thank my mother and father because without them I could never have gotten this far". You want to hit that, don't you?