Kennedy Center Honors for Buddy Guy, Dustin Hoffman and Led Zeppelin

September 12, 2012, 11:00 am

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

WASHINGTON- The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday named Buddy Guy, Dustin Hoffman, David Letterman, Natalia Makarova and Led Zeppelin to receive this year's Kennedy Center Honors.

The award is given for lifetime achievement in the performing arts. David M. Rubenstein, the chairman of the Kennedy Center, said the recipients demonstrated “extraordinary talent, creativity and tenacity” over their careers.

Mr. Hoffman, 75, the Academy Award-winning actor who demonstrated his versatility with roles ranging from an autistic man in “Rain Man” to a divorced father in “Kramer v. Kramer,” mused about what the award said about his career. “Are they telling me it's over?” he said a telephone interview from the Toronto International Film Festival, where he is making his directorial debut with the film “Quartet.” “I hope it means on to the next frontier.”

Mr. Letterman, 65, who is on track to surpass Johnny Carson as the longest tenured late-night television talk-show host, described his selection as a “mix-up,” but said he was grateful to receive the award.

Mr. Guy, 76, the pioneering blues guitarist and singer whose energetic way of playing the electric guitar inspired a generation of rock musicians, said he was in disbelief. “I said, ‘No, it can't be me,'” he said in a telephone interview on Tuesday from New Jersey, where he was headlining a show with Jonny Lang. “I'm not that big.”

Active for about a decade, in the late 1960s and 70s, the British band Led Zeppelin is regarded as one of the most successful rock groups in history.

Like that of Yo-Yo Ma in 2011, Ms. Makarova's selection highlights a foreign-born artist with past ties to the center. She left the Kirov Ballet in the Soviet Union to join the American Ballet Theater and performed in “Romeo and Juliet” the week the Kennedy Center opened in 1971. Now 71, she said receiving the award was a “remarkable twist of fate.”

The center has said that the primary criterion in the selection process is excellence and that the board of directors strives for balance across disciplines. But social diversity also seems to be part of the mission. In all but eight years, the recipients included one or more women, African-Americans and foreign-born performers.

The 35th Honors medals will be presented at a dinner at the State Department on Dec. 1, followed the next day by a reception at the White House and a performance at the Kennedy Center. The performance will be taped for a television broadcast on Dec. 26 at 9 p.m. on CBS.