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Dustin Hoffman

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It was acrimonious. There are actors who've thrown directors across the room. With me, it was always emotional, Talmudic arguing. Sometimes Sydney was right and sometimes I was right. He didn't want Bill Murray [as Michael Dorsey's sarcastic roommate] and I did, so that was a case where I won out. And he didn't want to play the agent. I talked him into that. We were having our disagreements before we started shooting, and finally I said to him, ''Sydney, it's the same relationship we're having as actor and director. It'll be so easy to transfer it to film.''

RAIN MAN 1988

As autistic savant Raymond Babbitt, Hoffman created an eerie array of evasive behaviors: never looking in the eyes of costar Tom Cruise (his hotshot car-salesman brother), cocking his head like a bird, repeating odd phrases in a childlike singsong. He clinched his second Best Actor trophy over his old pal and former roommate Gene Hackman (Mississippi Burning), as well as that up-and-comer Tom Hanks (a first-time nominee for Big).

That movie succeeds because of [director] Barry Levinson. He understood it. He had done no research on autism. And with all the research I had done, by the third day I begged him to fire me 'cause nothing came out of it. It was just a hodgepodge — I didn't have a character. I was petrified and baffled. Many directors would have called the studio. He said, ''Hold on.'' He never gets upset. He said, ''Let's look at all the rushes and tell me what you don't like and what you do like.'' He just guided me, and said, ''Anything you don't like, we'll reshoot at the end,'' and calmed me down... I owe him that performance.

WAG THE DOG 1997

The Oscar buzz that year said the actor award would go to Jack Nicholson for As Good as It Gets. So Hoffman, surprised to be in the race at all for playing a florid, robe-wearing movie producer-turned-political propagandist — a performance modeled in good part on Hollywood player Robert Evans — dreamed of truly enjoying his seventh nomination to date.

Getting even is part of being an artist. You get even with what you think the lies of society are by telling the truth. And I wanted to get even for this constant thing of people, when they lose, getting up and going ''Bravo!'' to the [winner]. It's just not natural. You can still like the work, but why, publicly, do you have to be seen putting on a face?... That's what these awards do. They make losers out of artists who've done wonderful work.... So when they announced Nicholson, I wanted to [rip open] my tuxedo shirt and have a T-shirt underneath that said ''Aaaaaw, f---.'' Or ''Aaaaaw, s---.'' Because the camera would be on me. And my wife talked me out of it. Thank God I have my wife, because if I didn't, I'd be in jail.