Richard Dreyfuss

Biography

Richard Dreyfuss (born October 29, 1947, in New York City) is an American actor who emerged from the New Hollywood generation and became one of the leading men of 1970s American cinema. He has won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA, and his career spans film, television and the stage.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens before his family moved to Los Angeles when he was nine, Dreyfuss began acting in community theatre in Beverly Hills and made his television debut at fifteen. After a year of college, he performed alternative service as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, working at a hospital, while picking up small parts on series such as Gunsmoke and Bewitched. His first film appearances were brief, in Valley of the Dolls (1967) and The Graduate (1967), where he has only a few lines. American Graffiti (1973), directed by George Lucas, brought him wider attention alongside Harrison Ford, and he then took his first lead in the Canadian production The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974).

Steven Spielberg cast him in two of the decade's biggest hits, Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). That same year he starred in The Goodbye Girl, which earned him the Best Actor Oscar and made him the youngest winner in that category up to that point. A period of unsuccessful films and mounting drug use followed, until a car accident in 1982 led to rehabilitation. He returned with Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986) and Stakeout (1987), and later with Stand by Me (1986), in which he provides the adult narration, and Always (1989). He worked with Bill Murray in the comedy What About Bob? (1991) and with Michael Douglas in The American President (1995), and received a second Best Actor nomination for Mr. Holland's Opus that year.

He has kept up a steady career in independent film, television and theatre, playing figures such as Fagin in Oliver Twist (1997) and Bernie Madoff in the miniseries Madoff (2016). Critics and peers regard him as a solid, highly respected performer, and his place in film history rests on his work with Spielberg as much as on his more personal films of the 1980s and 1990s.

Key films

• Jaws (1975): Matt Hooper, one of the three men hunting the shark.
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): Claude Lacombe, a scientist obsessed with UFO sightings.
• The Goodbye Girl (1977): Elliot Garfield, the role that won him the Oscar.
• American Graffiti (1973): one of the young people in a California town on the last night of summer 1962.
• Stand by Me (1986): the adult writer recalling his childhood, directed by Rob Reiner.
• Mr. Holland's Opus (1995): the music teacher Glenn Holland, Oscar-nominated.