Make Page Six a Preferred Source Dustin Hoffman’s love of cocaine could have been a massive issue, but one side effect of the addicting drug led him to quit the habit early on.
The actor reveals in his new memoir, “Look At Me,” that he was introduced to the party drug in the ’70s after ending his marriage to Anne Byrne.
At the time, Hoffman, 89, was filming the 1976 thriller “Marathon Man,” writing that Paramount honcho and pal Bob Evans had recently introduced him to coke.
“God, did I love it,” he writes, but luckily for Hoffman, the drug “stuffed me up terribly. The day after I did coke, I could barely breathe.”
The “Tootsie” star added that he’s grateful for the side effect.
“If it weren’t for the congestion,” he notes, “I’d be dead right now. That’s how much I love cocaine.”
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Evans, who died in 2019, was convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1980.
In “Marathon Man,” Hoffman plays a Columbia University graduate student who unwittingly becomes ensnared in a plot by a Nazi war criminal (played by Laurence Olivier) to retrieve stolen diamonds from a safe deposit box.
Hoffman writes he felt “self-conscious,” referring to the acclaimed actor as Lord Olivier, so he began calling him “‘Lordage’ instead, which amused him, and he kept calling me ‘dear boy.”
After the movie wrapped, Olivier gave Hoffman twelve volumes of the Temple Shakespeare Collection “with all his notes in the margins.”
“These aren’t the fancy editions,” Olivier told him. “But they’re my favorite. These are for you now, dear boy.”
Elsewhere in the book, Hoffman writes about the “terrible” experience he had working on “The Graduate” and the surprisingly small sum he was left with after paying his expenses shooting the movie.
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