The Graduate made Dustin Hoffman famous enough to be stopped for autographs, yet he says he needed unemployment benefits once his earnings ran out.
In his memoir Look At Me, the 89-year-old actor says he paid his own travel costs to Los Angeles for filming. After that and his other expenses, he had $3,000 left.
“I couldn’t go out in the street without people coming up to touch me and ask for my autograph, but I was still basically broke,” Hoffman wrote.
His time collecting benefits was brief. Life magazine published a photograph of him at an unemployment agency, and Hoffman says the attention left him too embarrassed to return.
“I could never go back in there again,” he wrote. “I was embarrassed by the dirty looks from other people standing in line who needed the money and assumed I didn’t.”