Dustin Hoffman has described the end of his first marriage as like “losing a limb.” He was going through a breakup with ballerina and actress Anne Byrne when he made Kramer vs. Kramer, the divorce drama that earned him his first Best Actor Oscar. In 1980, the year he and Byrne divorced, he married Lisa Gottsegen Hoffman, whose family had known his for years.
With his memoir Look at Me out November 10, here’s a look at both marriages below.
Lisa Hoffman
Dustin married Lisa Gottsegen Hoffman in October 1980. Their families knew each other long before they started dating. Dustin’s mother was close friends with Lisa’s grandmother, and Lisa remembers him playing piano and encouraging her to dance around the living room at a family gathering when she was a child. Lisa trained as a lawyer and later launched her own skincare and fragrance business.
They have four children, Jake, Rebecca, Max and Alexandra. When Dustin filmed on location, Lisa and the kids often went with him. “We went with him to make his movies, from Morocco to Cincinnati, and I think it helped being together,” Lisa said. In a 2017 interview with Closer Weekly, she summed up what it took to stay married for decades. “We work hard at it,” she said.
Anne Byrne
Dustin married Anne Byrne, a ballerina and actress, in 1969. He adopted her daughter Karina from a previous marriage, and they had a daughter together, Jenna. Byrne appeared in Woody Allen’s Manhattan in 1979, by which point she and Dustin had already separated. They divorced in 1980.
Dustin drew on the breakup while making Kramer vs. Kramer, the 1979 divorce drama that earned him his first Best Actor Oscar. He told British GQ that he worked with director Robert Benton to bring some of what he was going through into the script. “I expected it to be a painful experience,” he said of making the film. “It was liberating.”