Luck, by chance

Hollywood has never been renowned for celebrating age and experience over youth and beauty. However, men in movies, we generally assume, are granted a longer shelf life than most women. Like siring children, leading men can seemingly continue to head up a cast well into their craggy, pensionable years. It's a shock, then, to hear, from the mouth of Dustin Hoffman, a true Hollywood heavyweight, with two Oscars, five Golden Globes and three Baftas under his belt, that this is far from the case. "How many leads are written for someone who is 74 years old?" he asks. "Three-dimensional, interesting, leading characters — they don't write those roles for people in my age bracket." The star of iconic films including The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Marathon Man, Tootsie, Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man inquires, wryly: "How many years am I facing now when the most interesting roles will be animated?" Happily for Hoffman, the full-time voice-over career can wait, thanks to Luck, a new high-rolling horse racing drama. The much-anticipated series boasts a stable of big hitters, including Nick Nolte, David Milch, the show's creator, and executive producer Michael Mann, who also directed the pilot. This transfer of some of film's greatest talents to the small screen is part of a process that is seeing television eclipsing film as the home of quality drama. Hoffman gives a lucid explanation of why this is happening: "You cannot get a shot of doing your best work in [film's] studio system. There's committees. There's meetings. They're on the set. They get involved in a kind of quasi — at least I think it is — creative way, but they buck heads with people that they shouldn't be bucking heads with. And with HBO, once they give a ‘go', there is no committee. These guys are allowed to try to do their best work, and they then give it to us. And I think that for some years now, the first-rate writers have all been going to television, not films." We meet in a Beverly Hills hotel, where, dapper in a dark blue suit, he settles down on the sofa, sipping on a large, tomato juice-based drink filled with foliage. Is it a Virgin Mary, I inquire, or something more potent? "Oh, a Virgin Mary," he grins, "Or am I just happy to see you?" Tanned, lean and healthy-looking with a thick thatch of silvery hair, he has certainly lost none of his twinkle. He is just back from Buckinghamshire, where he has been behind the camera — his directorial debut, indeed — for a new BBC film, Quartet, starring a couple of British acting greats, Dame Maggie Smith and Albert Finney. In Luck, Hoffman plays Chester "Ace" Bernstein, a quietly powerful, wealthy and well-connected man, recently released from serving three years in prison. "I think he is a man who has lived as honourable a life as he could, in an alternative universe," Hoffman says of Ace. Multiple storylines "Maybe not in the mafia himself, but as someone who has dealt with the mob, he has tried to live a life where he is a man of his word." Hoffman nibbles on a celery stick from his glass. "And you don't f**k with him." Luck sets numerous plates spinning from the start: Nolte is a grizzled horse trainer carrying high hopes for his young stallion; two ambitious young jockeys are vying for position; and a quartet of degenerate gamblers have unexpectedly won a life-changing sum. The disparate characters are all brought together beside the historic Santa Anita racetrack in southern California. Hoffman was unfamiliar with the world of daily doubles, pick sixes, purses and stipes before filming. "I still don't really know much about it all," he shrugs. Neither had he communed much with horses. "I have a very short stride when I walk," he explains. "It's very hard for me to get my legs around a horse." Hoffman grew up in Los Angeles, where his father worked as a set decorator at Columbia Pictures. After high school, Hoffman enrolled to study medicine, but dropped out after a year to join the Pasadena Playhouse. Between sporadic small roles, for six years Hoffman supported himself by working in restaurant cloakrooms and for the Yellow Pages. But then in 1967 Mike Nichols cast him as the directionless Benjamin Braddock, opposite Ann Bancroft in The Graduate. Hoffman was 30 and in only his second film role: it won him an Oscar nomination. Hoffman is married to Lisa, his second wife, with whom he has two daughters, two sons and two grandchildren. Aside from the lack of satisfying movie roles for men of a certain age, he credits Lisa with persuading him to take to the small screen. "I'm not a big television watcher," he admits. "But I asked my wife, and she said, ‘Well, you know, get with the times.' So I've signed a contract that I'm done when I'm 80." He's kidding, of course, but a second series has already been given the green light. So, with a little more Luck, who knows?