the actor among us; John Burnham Schwartz recalls the summer when his parents' divorce, through Dustin Hoffman's uncanny tenacity, became fodder for Kramer vs.

Byline: John Burnham Schwartz

It was a rainy night in an old beach house on the Atlantic coast; I was fourteen years old. John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men was on my summer reading list for boarding school, and after dinner, as my family drifted back into the living room to sit by the fire, one of our houseguests-a famous, energetic, and physically unprepossessing actor with a prominent nose and a flat, nasal voice-picked up my copy of the book, opened it to the first page, and began performing it aloud, inhabiting the vastly disparate minds and voices of the protagonists, George and Lennie, with uncanny precision. At first, self-conscious smiles appeared in our ...