Dustin Hoffman, actor, Tootsie

Columbia allowed me to spend money on makeup tests. Dick Smith, the best makeup man around, was hired. We were challenged for a number of months. We wanted to be able to fool the audience. I already have a neck that's out of proportion with the rest of my body so we worked on costumes to soften that. And lifts were given to me to pull up my face almost like a facelift.

I didn't want to have falsetto like in Some Like it Hot because they had done everything you could do with that. I remember being in the shower and trying the voice for the umpteenth time and I thought instead of trying the voice, maybe I should recite the lines of great female parts. I was thinking about what parts Dorothy would have had in regional theater. I thought she would love to play Blanche Dubois. It was like lightning struck because Blanche DuBois is southern and by trying to inflect a southern accent, it caused the ends of my sentences to go up rather than down.

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