Dustin Hoffman, the Rain Man star, has undergone a battle with cancer back in 2013 and ended up a winner. However, despite this fact, he never really spoke of his journey to being healthy again.

At the time, a spokeswoman for the then-75-year-old actor-director confirmed that Hoffman is “feeling great and in good health” after undergoing cancer treatment. Publicist Jodi Gottlieb shaed with the site that Hoffman’s cancer was detected early and “surgically cured.”

It was in 1967 that Hoffman had his breakthrough role in the romantic comedy The Graduate, which earned him his first Academy Award nomination. He was 30 at the time, and the rest is history. Over the years, he has landed a huge number of roles that placed him high on the list of best male actors there are.

Among the movies he played in are All the President’s Men (1976) and 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer.

The film Tootsie, in which he played a man who dressed as a woman in order to land a role in a soap opera, was among those that left a long-lasting impression on the actor himself.

“If I was going to be a woman, I would want to be as beautiful as possible, and they said to me, ‘That’s as good as it gets.’ Uh, that’s as beautiful as we can get you,” Hoffman recalled in an interview with ABC News. When he heard that he wasn’t dubbed very pretty, the now 86-year-old actor had an epiphany that forever changed how he treats women.

“I went home and started crying,” Hoffman recalled. “I think I’m an interesting woman, when I look at myself on-screen, and I know that if I met myself at a party I would never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill, physically, the demands that we’re brought up to think women have to have in order for us to ask them out.”

Reaching the second highest grossing film of that year, Hoffman said that although it made many laugh, Tootsie was never a comedy for him.

In 1988, Hoffman won his second Oscar, for Rain Main – he earned his first for Kramer vs. Kramer – and went on to receive six Golden Globes and one Primetime Emmy.

His career was at his peak and he was in demand, but then, in 2013, he somehow fell quiet.

Many of his fans wondered where and why he was hiding, but it wasn’t until a few months following his directorial debut of the British comedy Quartet (2012), and shortly after finishing production on Chef (2014) in which he co-starred with Jon Favreau and Sofia Vergara, that a representative shared the reason of his reclusive behavior.

He battled cancer and he kept that battle private, his publicist shared with People.

“It was detected early, and he has been surgically cured,” Gottlieb said. “Dustin is feeling great and is in good health.” It has been suggested that he had throat cancer.

It’s been almost 11 years since he was cured, and despite the health difficulties he had experienced, Hoffman never slowed down. Since his cancer diagnosis was revealed, he starred in a number of movies, including Sam and Kate in 2022 and the 2024 sci-fi drama Megalopolis. He has also loaned his voice to Master Shifu in two more installments of the Kung Fu Panda franchise (2008 to 2024).

Recently, he and his wife were spotted on the streets of London and looked as in love as ever. “The Hollywood legend looked years younger than 86 as he smiled and waved at the cameras. He was tanned and carefree as he strolled through the city and ducked into boutiques with his wife of 43 years, wrote Hello!”