Dustin Hoffman Is The Best Actor Ever The story isn't entirely apocryphal. Laurence Olivier, the twentieth-century god of Shakespearian acting, really did, in a moment of amused exasperation, respond to his "Marathon Man" co-star's intentionally induced mental and physical exhaustion by asking "Dear boy, why don't you try acting?" It just wasn't the old-school smackdown of method acting that traditionalists have been gloating over for years, but, rather, a fatherly shrug when faced with the immersive, emotionally supercharged approach to performance championed by Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner. Olivier came from a drastically different school of acting, but...