Legendary American actor Dustin Hoffman recalled his decades-spanning career while accepting the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema at the opening ceremony of the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Visibly emotional after watching a long showreel trailing some of his greatest roles in films like “Tootsie,” “Rain Man” and “Kramer vs Kramer,” the actor said he feels “very lucky” to have “his life’s work on a screen staring back at you.”
Hoffman, who will also present a special screening of Mike Nichols’s 1967 drama “The Graduate” at the festival, started his passionate speech by saying he felt “honored and humbled” by the award. The actor recalled working with the late Robert Redford in Alan J. Pakula’s lauded investigative thriller “All the President’s Men,” stating Redford told him back then: “You never think about a body of work while you’re making movies, because you’re busy building the body. And that’s true. The pleasure of doing what we do is being engrossed in the work itself and losing track of time.”
“I first fell in love with acting because it was the first time I felt lost in time,” he continued. “I knew instinctively that this was how I wanted to live. I wanted to be lost in time. I wanted to be absorbed in time. Why? Because it made me feel alive.”
