Richard Dreyfuss biography

Synopsis

Profile

(born Oct. 29, 1947, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.) American film actor known for his portrayals of ordinary men driven to emotional extremes.

After spending his early childhood in Brooklyn and Queens, New York, Dreyfuss moved with his family to California, where he began acting in plays at the West Side Jewish Community Center in Beverly Hills, California. He studied drama for a year at San Fernando Valley State College, Northridge, California, and shortly thereafter he won a recurring role on the short-lived television series Karen (1964). During the late 1960s and early '70s Dreyfuss acted mostly onstage in everything from repertory theatre to Broadway shows, and he landed occasional small roles on television. Bit parts in Valley of the Dolls (1967) and The Graduate (1967) led to his first major screen appearance, as gangster Baby Face Nelson in Dillinger (1973), for which he received critical praise.

Dreyfuss's breakthrough role was that of intelligent, angst-ridden high-school graduate Curt Henderson in George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973). The character was the first in a long line of average fellows in stressful situations that Dreyfuss would portray in the coming decade. With a slightly stocky frame and plain, Everyman features, Dreyfuss was well-suited to a variety of “ordinary Joe” roles, but his nuanced performances revealed the quiet turmoil and insecurities that often lie beneath such ordinariness.

His subsequent films helped establish Dreyfuss as one of the top stars of the 1970s. His portrayal of an overly ambitious, self-destructive young entrepreneur in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) remains one of his most-praised performances. For director Steven Spielberg, Dreyfuss starred in two of the most popular films of the decade: first as scruffy young marine biologist Matt Hooper in Jaws (1975), and then as a family man whose behaviour becomes increasingly unstable after encountering a UFO in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Dreyfuss capped this successful period with an Academy Award-winning performance in the Neil Simon comedy The Goodbye Girl (1977); at age 29, Dreyfuss became the youngest-ever recipient of a best actor Oscar.

In the late 1970s and early '80s Dreyfuss appeared in a handful of moderately successful films, including The Big Fix (1978), The Competition (1980), Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981), and The Buddy System (1983), but his career had declined, and he suffered from a well-publicized problem with drug addiction. He made a strong comeback