In Hoffman the rage is more hidden, but it can erupt if he feels that his fiercely held acting processes and judgments are being violated, especially by directors who seem to know nothing about acting. They are the ones who grow impatient if the actors gradually explore their characters, who want to impose their own ideas, who do not want to join the actors in jumping off that precipice—“What? Your wife just died and you want to start laughing?” The anger, Hoffman explains, “comes from your toes. It’s a wonderful feeling.” He adds, “Hackman doesn’t talk. He just picks the person up and throws him out the window.” Duvall says, “It’s hard to be diplomatic when you’re using yourself, your own temperament, to give what the character calls for.” When one film director told him to pause and smile, Duvall walked off the set.

With only the help of such mentors as George Morrison and Ulu Grosbard at first, they subsisted on television work, Off Broadway roles, movie bit parts. Then flukes of fate brought breakthroughs. Auditioning for Morrison’s Any Wednesday in 1962, Hackman was the only candidate who made everybody laugh. He was cast opposite the late Sandy Dennis, but she refused to do the play with him. She had just broken up with a man she had been living with, and he looked like Gene. Just before the opening, the actor who had been cast withdrew. When Sandy Dennis was told that Hackman would do the part after all, she wept, saying, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it.” She was cajoled to go ahead, and the play was a hit. The next year Hackman had a small role in the movie Lilith, with Warren Beatty. Then Mike Nichols cast him as Mrs. Robinson’s husband in The Graduate, but fired him after a few days of rehearsals. Thus he was free when Beatty wanted him as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde, a role that won him an Academy Award nomination.

In 1955 the playwright Horton Foote happened to see Duvall play a weepy drunk in a Neighborhood Playhouse production. A few years later he saw him again, on a TV show, playing a man falsely accused of child molestation. Impressed by the two performances, Foote suggested him for the fear-inspiring but gentle Boo Radley in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he wrote the screenplay. That breakthrough was cemented in 1965 by an Obie for the second portrayal of Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge.

For years Hoffman scraped along, teaching acting, working as a stage manager and an assistant director. He got a first break in the 1964 season at the tiny repertory Theater Company of Boston, where he succeeded in getting Duvall cast with him in Waiting for Godot, which went to New York for one night and was seen by Ulu Grosbard. Hoffman’s next break was in Morrison’s 1965 Harry, Noon and Night, which led that year to Grosbard’s The Subject Was Roses when the original Broadway cast went on tour. After the first rehearsal, Hoffman spilled burning oil on his arm, and the wound became infected. He almost died. But that accident kicked off his future stardom. It meant he was available in 1966 to play a 40-year-old Russian clerk Off Broadway in The Journey of the Fifth Horse, which won him an Obie for best actor. It also brought him to the attention of the producer Theodore Mann, who cast him as a Cockney factory worker in the farce Eh? That performance led to his being called the next year to Los Angeles to screen-test for Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. To do it, he turned down an audition for the film The Producers. Mel Brooks called him and said, “You’ll be back.” Hoffman arrived at the screen test sleepless and paranoid. He mangled Mike Nichols’s directions and enraged Katherine Ross in a love scene by grabbing her buttocks and yanking her close. As he was leaving, he apologized to her and Nichols. A New York subway token fell out of his coat, and one of the crew handed it to him, saying, “Here, kid, you’re gonna need this.” But Hoffman’s confused panic was exactly what Nichols wanted.

Summing up, Hoffman says, “If we had been at a party with a bunch of unemployed actors and somebody had said, ‘See those three? They’re going to be Hollywood stars,’ the whole place would have erupted, and we would have been part of the laughter. Those years were all during the Beat Generation. Our affectation was anti-Establishment. ‘Making it’ meant staying pure, not selling out. ‘Making it’ meant doing the work. We’re not different today. If something happened and it was over, and suddenly we had to work in a community theater, we’re there. And I’m telling you, we would love every minute of it.” Robert Duvall has his own wistful coda: “It was a supportive kind of thing then, you know, sharing idealism. What could be. And once they were successful, you never saw anybody. It’s very strange that way. Very strange.” But fate may again step in. Universal Pictures is developing a script to star all three of these old friends in the near future.