Richard Dreyfuss | Biography, Movies, & Facts | Britannica (2025)

Richard Dreyfuss (born October 29, 1947, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) is an American film actor known for his portrayals of ordinary men driven to emotional extremes.

After spending his early childhood in Brooklyn and Queens, New York, Dreyfuss moved with his family to California, where he began acting in plays at the West Side Jewish Community Center in Beverly Hills, California. He studied drama for a year at San Fernando Valley State College, Northridge, California, and shortly thereafter he won a recurring role on the short-lived television series Karen (1964). During the late 1960s and early ’70s Dreyfuss acted mostly onstage in everything from repertory theatre to Broadway shows, and he landed occasional small roles on television. Bit parts in Valley of the Dolls (1967) and The Graduate (1967) led to his first major screen appearance, as gangster Baby Face Nelson in Dillinger (1973), for which he received critical praise.

Dreyfuss’s breakthrough role was that of intelligent, angst-ridden high-school graduate Curt Henderson in George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973). The character was the first in a long line of average fellows in stressful situations that Dreyfuss would portray in the coming decade. With a slightly stocky frame and plain, Everyman features, Dreyfuss was well-suited to a variety of “ordinary Joe” roles, but his nuanced performances revealed the quiet turmoil and insecurities that often lie beneath such ordinariness.

His subsequent films helped establish Dreyfuss as one of the top stars of the 1970s. His portrayal of an overly ambitious, self-destructive young entrepreneur in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) remains one of his most-praised performances. For director Steven Spielberg, Dreyfuss starred in two of the most popular films of the decade: first as scruffy young marine biologist Matt Hooper in Jaws (1975), and then as a family man whose behaviour becomes increasingly unstable after encountering a UFO in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Dreyfuss capped this successful period with an Academy Award-winning performance in the Neil Simon comedy The Goodbye Girl (1977); at age 29, Dreyfuss became the then youngest recipient of a best actor Oscar.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s Dreyfuss appeared in a handful of moderately successful films, including The Big Fix (1978), The Competition (1980), Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981), and The Buddy System (1983), but his career had declined, and he suffered from a well-publicized problem with drug addiction. He made a strong comeback costarring with Bette Midler and Nick Nolte in the Paul Mazursky comedy Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986). With his career back on track, Dreyfuss appeared in such notable films as the comedy adventure Stakeout (1987) and the psychological drama Nuts (1987), in which he costarred with Barbra Streisand. One of Dreyfuss’s best films from this period was director Barry Levinson’s Tin Men (1987), a comedy both darkly satiric and nostalgically bittersweet, in which Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito portray rival aluminum-siding salesmen in early 1960s Baltimore.

Dreyfuss maintained his popularity into the 1990s, although many of his later films—such as Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), What About Bob? (1991), and Once Around (1991)—were more critical favourites than box-office successes. His sensitive multilayered performance as a musician who foregoes dreams of a composing career to teach high school in Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995) earned Dreyfuss another Oscar nomination.

Some of his best-known work at the turn of the 21st century was made for television. He received good notices for his portrayal of gangster Meyer Lansky in the David Mamet-scripted teleplay Lansky (1999), and he portrayed the president of the United States in the well-regarded live TV adaptation of Fail Safe (2000). From 2001 to 2002 he starred as a history professor in the series The Education of Max Bickford. He made appearances on other television shows, among them Weeds, Parenthood, and Your Family or Mine. He portrayed corrupt investment manager Bernie Madoff in the television miniseries Madoff (2016).

Dreyfuss continued to act in feature films, and his later movies included Poseidon (2006), a remake of The Poseidon Adventure (1972); W., Oliver Stone’s biopic of Pres. George W. Bush in which Dreyfuss starred as Vice Pres. Dick Cheney; and the romantic comedy My Life in Ruins (2009). He then stole scenes as a Jewish drug mogul in the comedy-thriller Leaves of Grass (2009). In 2010 he appeared in the horror movie Piranha 3D in a role intended as an homage to his character in Jaws and then played a wealthy villain in the action comedy RED. Dreyfuss’s roles from 2018 included a man courting a successful judge (played by Candice Bergen) in the romantic comedy Book Club and a Russian gangster in Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s directorial debut, Bayou Caviar. The Last Laugh and Astronaut were among his films released in 2019.

In collaboration with Hugo Award-winning author Harry Turtledove, Dreyfuss released a critically praised novel, The Two Georges (1996), a humorous look at what American life might be like had the United States not won the Revolutionary War.