When Dustin Hoffman walked up to collect his Golden Globe for Kramer vs. Kramer in January 1980, he opened with a line nobody in the room expected. “I would like to thank divorce,” he said, as the Golden Globes recalled years later. The audience laughed. Hoffman was only half joking, because the role he was being honored for, a father whose wife walks out, had arrived in the middle of the end of his own first marriage.
Most fans know Hoffman, now 89, as the husband of Lisa Hoffman, his wife of more than four decades. Fewer remember Anne Byrne, the dancer he married in 1969, not long after The Graduate made him a star. Their story, as HELLO! retold it this week, began long before the fame, in a New York comedy club where he was the guy at the piano.
How Did Dustin Hoffman Meet Anne Byrne?
In 1963, Hoffman was a struggling actor sharing apartments and odd jobs with friends like Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall. One of his roommates, the opera singer Maurice Stern, took a young ballet dancer named Anne Byrne on a date to The Improvisation, the club where Hoffman played piano. According to HELLO!, she and Hoffman hit it off right away, and their early days together were spent reading poetry and walking through art galleries. The magazine reports that he even bet Duvall $100 that he would marry her one day.
Byrne, born in New York City in 1943, danced with the Pennsylvania Ballet and trained at American Ballet Theatre. To a broke actor waiting for his break, she seemed out of reach. “She was my fantasy girl. The unattainable,” Hoffman told Vanity Fair in 2004.
The break came in 1967 with The Graduate, and the wedding followed in May 1969, six years after that first meeting. Hoffman adopted Karina, Byrne’s daughter from an earlier marriage, and the couple soon welcomed a daughter of their own, Jenna. Byrne stepped back from dancing to raise the girls while her husband’s career took off with Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man and All the President’s Men. The fantasy girl had become a family, but the life around them was changing fast.
What Pulled Their Marriage Apart?
By the late 1970s the strain was showing. According to Time magazine, as cited by HELLO!, the marriage began to unravel in 1977, when Hoffman was in Los Angeles filming Straight Time. He wanted Byrne to join him there. She chose to stay in New York, where her own career was finally moving again. She went on to act as well, and film fans may remember her as Emily, the wife of Michael Murphy’s character, in Woody Allen’s Manhattan in 1979.
Two careers, two coasts and two young daughters proved too much. The couple divorced in 1980 after 11 years of marriage. Hoffman married Lisa Gottsegen, a 25-year-old psychology graduate, later that same year, and HELLO! reports the wedding came just six days after his divorce was final. They have four children together and are still married today.
Byrne built a new life of her own. In 1986 she married actor and producer Ivan Kronenfeld, and they stayed together until his death in 2018. Her final film role came in 1980, the year of the divorce, and she has lived largely out of the public eye since. Hoffman, though, carried the end of their marriage straight onto a movie set.
Why Did Hoffman Thank Divorce At The Golden Globes?
When producer Stanley Jaffe and director Robert Benton first brought him Kramer vs. Kramer, Hoffman turned it down. He was going through his divorce at the time and was thinking about leaving film for the stage, according to the film’s production history. Only after meeting the filmmakers in London did he agree to play Ted Kramer, a workaholic ad man who has to learn how to be a father to his young son, Billy, after his wife, played by Meryl Streep, leaves.
He brought so much of his own life into the part that he contributed scenes and dialogue to the script, and Benton offered him a shared screenwriting credit, which he declined. He later described the role as a turning point for him as a parent. “Giving myself permission not only to be present but to be a father was a kind of epiphany for me at that time,” Hoffman said. The intensity he brought to set also caused real friction, as DYR has written about in the story of his tense relationship with Meryl Streep during filming.
It all paid off. Kramer vs. Kramer became the top-grossing film of 1979 in the United States and Canada and won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Hoffman. That is why the joke at the Golden Globes landed the way it did. The worst year of his personal life had given him one of his greatest roles. And the woman who walked into a comedy club on another man’s arm in 1963 was, in her own quiet way, part of the reason he was standing on that stage.
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