Dustin Hoffman has revealed he thought he was going to die after being confronted by the husband of a woman he was having an affair with. The 89-year-old actor, who has been married twice, shared the story during an interview on the podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend.
Recalling the confrontation
Speaking about an affair he had before settling down, Hoffman explained: "In my youth I was having an affair with a married woman. And she thought that once her husband went to sleep, he stayed asleep. And I was invited to come over after he went to sleep."
"And there we are having a festival of sorts and he walked in with a gun. And he pointed at me. And he said, 'Get out, get out'."
Hoffman recalled the fear of the moment: "When you have a gun pointed at you, first of all, that hole is much bigger than the actual hole." He added: "And you realise how, any second, he's going to pull that trigger. And you think and you realise, I'm gonna die the next second. You will do anything to avoid getting killed."
Asked whether he and the unnamed woman "continued the festival" after her husband had calmed down, he replied: "No."
Marriage to Lisa Hoffman
Hoffman has been married to his second wife, Lisa, since 1980. According to various reports, the actor once said of having a good marriage: "To have a successful marriage, a man must, on a fundamental level be scared s***less of his wife."
Opening up about their marriage in 2016, Lisa said they were "more in love" than when they got married. "We've been married 36 years and together 40 years," she told The Daily Telegraph at the time. "I say in Hollywood it is like dog years so you have to multiply that by seven. Maybe we are more in love [than when we got married]... it continues to grow."
How they met
According to Lisa, the actor's mother was close with her grandmother, which is how she was introduced to Hoffman, who is 17 years her senior. When the pair met again at Lisa's grandfather's funeral, she recalled an instant connection.
"My grandfather had recently passed away and Dustin came to pay his condolences," she said in 2007. "That first look and I knew... Dustin asked how many children I wanted. I said six, and he said he had two already, so would four be okay. And that's exactly the way it has played out."
Sharing how she juggled their children with Hoffman's career, she told People Magazine: "One of the challenges that actors have is that they travel often for their jobs. Dustin and I made the decision immediately that we would stick together and no matter how challenging it was for our children or for us, we went everywhere with him, the whole group of us. We went with him to make his movies, from Morocco to Cincinnati, and I think it helped being together."
