‘Tootsie’: Don’t cry, Dustin Hoffman, please don’t cry [Video]

Dustin Hoffman, in a viral video in which he talks “Tootsie,� has some deep regrets about the women he snubbed because they were less than great looking.

In the video from the American Film Institute, released late last year but newly viral, Hoffman gets choked up talking about the film and his desire to appear more beautiful in his role as Dorothy Michaels in the 1982 comedy. But the makeup crew simply couldn’t do it: They told him “that’s as good as it gets,� he says with a smile.

Hoffman says he subsequently told his wife: “I have to make this picture.�

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Why? Because, he says, if he met Michaels at a party he would pass her by “because she doesn’t fulfill physically the demands that we’re brought up to think ... women have to have.�

Hoffman then tries to compose himself: “There are too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.�

He says of his role: “That was never a comedy for me.�

The video was filmed just a few months after news that “Tootsie� would come to Broadway.

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As the Los Angeles Times reported last August, Sony signed a five-year deal with Broadway producer Scott Sanders to adapt the studio’s films for the stage. First up? “Tootsie.� As the New York Post’s Michael Riedel noted at the time, the movie was so good, anyone trying to follow it with a stage production “must be brave or foolhardy.�

Perhaps the movie was so successful because the man behind Dorothy Michaels had a sensitive side.

Hoffman, nearing his 76th birthday, should feel free to pass on his enlightenment about female beauty to his Hollywood brethren.

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