Richard Dreyfuss

The actor who didn't want to be a star

Richard Dreyfuss took the stage in March 1978, wide-eyed with amazement. He was 30 years old and had just won the Oscar for Best Actor for The Goodbye Girl. At the time, he was the youngest man ever to win it. He beat out names that seemed untouchable, delivering a performance that blended neurosis with a strange tenderness.

But his path didn't begin on the great Broadway stages. He grew up in Brooklyn and later in Los Angeles, in a Jewish family with strong political convictions. His professional debut came in a community theater production when he was barely a teenager, though he didn't yet know that his verbal fluency would be his greatest weapon.

And everything changed because of a car.

In 1973, he played Curt Henderson in American Graffiti. George Lucas was looking for fresh faces, and Dreyfuss fit the profile of a young, somewhat lost intellectual. It was his first big break and the first time audiences saw the bespectacled kid who talked faster than others could think.

Cocaine and a wrecked car in 1982

Steven Spielberg trusted him for Jaws in 1975 because he needed someone who could argue with Robert Shaw without seeming like a pushover. The shoot was a constant technical disaster. Dreyfuss spent weeks seasick on a boat while the mechanical shark kept sinking again and again. That 9 million dollar budget ended up saving Universal from bankruptcy.

Shortly after, he reunited with the director in Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. He played Roy Neary with an obsession that bordered on the pathological (it's said Spielberg cast him because Dreyfuss begged for the role for months). The film grossed more than 300 million dollars worldwide.

And the gamble paid off.

In the late 70s, his face was everywhere. He earned astronomical fees, but he didn't handle the pressure of being Hollywood's hottest actor well. On the night of October 9, 1982, he crashed his Mercedes into a tree in Benedict Canyon. Police found cocaine and pills in the vehicle.

That incident abruptly halted his rise and forced him through a lengthy rehabilitation process. He lost major roles, and the industry turned its back on him for a considerable time until Disney decided to give him a second chance.

Books and Tight Budgets

He made a strong comeback in 1986 thanks to Down and Out in Beverly Hills. The production aimed to revive well-known names who had fallen on hard times. It was a box office success and led to more projects, such as Illegal Procedure in 1987. He was no longer the impetuous young man of the seventies, but he still had the same electric energy.

In 1995, he earned another Oscar nomination for Mr. Holland's Opus. The film tells the story of a frustrated musician who ends up loving teaching. It was a massive hit that grossed more than 80 million dollars in the United States alone and returned him to the front ranks of the industry.

He was no longer the impetuous young man of the seventies.

Dreyfuss chose to step away from commercial films to focus on civic education. In 2006, he founded The Dreyfuss Civics Initiative, with the goal of helping American children learn how their democracy works. It is an organization that remains active and takes up most of his time away from the sets.

In 2019, he appeared in the Netflix comedy The Last Laugh alongside Chevy Chase. It was a low-budget shoot in New Orleans that aimed to appeal to the nostalgia of older viewers. In 2022, he published the book One Can Dream: My Journey from Brooklyn to Hollywood, in which he candidly looks back on his personal mistakes.

In 2023, he appeared in the film Sweetwater, playing Red Auerbach. The production had an estimated budget of 10 million dollars and focused on the story of the first Black player in the NBA. Filming took place mainly on locations in California during the summer of 2022.