It is with a heavy heart I put together this post.
Some people will remember this man
for the way he died,but I prefer to
remember him for what he gave us in his life.
It took me a few days to put this together,
but in the end I think the New York Times
did a very good job with telling us about him.
So I leave the writing to professionals.
You gave us a great Capote.
You would have giving us an great Lionel Twain
Rest In Peace Philip.
Philip
Seymour Hoffman, perhaps the most ambitious and widely admired American
actor of his generation, who gave three-dimensional nuance to a wide
range of sidekicks, villains and leading men on screen and embraced some
of the theater’s most burdensome roles on Broadway, died on Sunday at
an apartment in Greenwich Village he was renting as an office. He was
46.
The death, from an apparent drug overdose, was confirmed by
the police. Mr. Hoffman was found in the apartment by a friend who had
become concerned after being unable to reach him. Investigators found a
syringe in his arm and, nearby, an envelope containing what appeared to
be heroin.
Mr. Hoffman was long known to struggle with addiction.
In 2006, he said in an interview with “60 Minutes” that he had given up
drugs and alcohol many years earlier, when he was 22. Last year he
checked into a rehabilitation program for about 10 days after a reliance
on prescription pills resulted in his briefly turning again to heroin.
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“I
saw him last week, and he was clean and sober, his old self,” said
David Bar Katz, a playwright, and the friend who found Mr. Hoffman and
called 911. “I really thought this chapter was over.”
A stocky,
often sleepy-looking man with blond, generally uncombed hair who favored
the rumpled clothes more associated with an out-of-work actor than a
star, Mr. Hoffman did not cut the traditional figure of a leading man,
though he was more than capable of leading roles.
In his final
appearance on Broadway, in 2012, he put his Everyman mien to work in
portraying perhaps the American theater’s most celebrated protagonist —
Willy Loman, Arthur Miller’s title character in “Death of a Salesman.”
At 44, he was widely seen as young for the part — the casting, by the
director Mike Nichols, was meant to emphasize the flashback scenes
depicting a younger, pre-disillusionment Willy — and though the
production drew mixed reviews, Mr. Hoffman was nominated for a Tony
Award.
“Mr. Hoffman does terminal uncertainty better than
practically anyone,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, “and he’s
terrific in showing the doubt that crumples Willy just when he’s trying
to sell his own brand of all-American optimism.”
In supporting
roles, he was nominated three times for Academy Awards — as a priest
under suspicion of sexual predation in “Doubt” (2008); as a C.I.A. agent
especially eloquent in high dudgeon in “Charlie Wilson’s War” (2007);
and as a charismatic cult leader in “The Master” (2012).
But he
won in the best actor category for “Capote” (2005). As the eccentrically
sociable, brilliantly probing and unflappably gay author of “In Cold
Blood,” Mr. Hoffman flawlessly affected the real-life Truman Capote’s
distinctly nasal, high-pitched voice and the naturally fey drama of his
presence. Writing in The Times, A. O. Scott described the film as being
about a writer’s relationship with his work.
“This makes for
better drama than you might expect,” Mr. Scott wrote. “Capote’s human
connections are, for the most part, secondary and instrumental, which
makes Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance all the more remarkable,
since he must connect with the audience without piercing the membrane of
his character’s narcissism.
“Not only does Mr. Hoffman achieve
an impressive physical and vocal transformation — mimicking Capote’s
chirpy drawl and appearing to shrink to his elfin stature — but he also
conveys, with clarity and subtlety, the complexities of Capote’s
temperament.”
Mr. Hoffman appeared in more than 50 films in a
career that spanned less than 25 years; in the early 1990s he had small
roles in “Leap of Faith,” which starred Steve Martin as a faith healer,
and “Scent of a Woman,” in which he played a prep school classmate of
Chris O’Donnell, the weekend escort of a blind former military officer
on a New York City jaunt, played by Al Pacino, who won an Oscar for the
role.
He appeared in big-budget Hollywood films — including
“Mission: Impossible III” (2006), “Moneyball” (2011) and “The Hunger
Games: Catching Fire” (2013) — and critically praised independent films,
including “The Savages” (2007), in which he and Laura Linney, as his
sister, struggle to care for their declining father; “Synecdoche, New
York” (2008), Charlie Kaufman’s offbeat drama in which he played a moody
theater director wrangling with his work and women; and “A Late
Quartet,” about a violinist in the midst of dual crises, familial and
musical.
But citing the highlights of Mr. Hoffman’s prolific work
life — which included directing and acting in Off Broadway shows for
the Labyrinth Theater Company, a New York City troupe, which he served
for a time as artistic director — undervalues his versatility and his
willingness, rare in a celebrity actor, to explore the depths of not
just creepy or villainous characters, but especially unattractive ones.
He was a chameleon of especially vivid colors in roles that called for
him to be unappealing.
He played an obsequious sycophant in the
Coen brothers’s cult comedy “The Big Lebowski” (1998); a former child
star pathetically desperate to reclaim his celebrity in “Along Came
Polly” (2004), a romantic comedy that starred Ben Stiller and Jennifer
Aniston; a chronic masturbator in Todd Solondz’s portrait of suburban
New Jersey, “Happiness” (1998); a snooty Princetonian in “The Talented
Mr. Ripley” (1999); a weaselly tabloid reporter who gets his comeuppance
(he’s glued to a wheelchair and set on fire) in “Red Dragon” (2002), an
adaptation of one of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels; and in the
role that brought him his first renown, he was Scotty J., a shy,
overweight, gay boom operator on a pornographic film in “Boogie Nights”
(1997).
In addition to “Death of a Salesman,” Mr. Hoffman
appeared as the anguished and violent playwright, Konstantin, in Mr.
Nichols’s production of “The Seagull” at the Delacorte Theater in
Central Park in 2001, and on Broadway in two other long and difficult
roles.
In 2000, he and John C. Reilly were in “True West,” Sam
Shepard’s harrowing comic drama about the reunion of two estranged
brothers; each of the two roles is substantial, but in this production,
directed by Matthew Warchus, the actors each played them both, switching
roles in different performances.
And in 2003, he played James
Tyrone, the doomed-to-alcoholism elder son of James and Mary Tyrone
(Brian Dennehy and Vanessa Redgrave) in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,”
Eugene O’Neill’s portrait of an epic family demise.
“The theater
was very difficult for him,” Robert Falls, the director of “Long Day’s
Journey,” said in an interview Sunday. “It cost him; there was an
emotional cost to the work, having to do it for eight performances a
week, and having to rehearse. In ‘Long Day’s Journey,’ a role about an
addict who would be dead in a number of years, who was filled with
self-loathing, certainly Phil had access to those emotions. But I’m not
talking about a method actor. He just brought every fiber of his being
to the stage. He was there — with his depth of feeling, depth of
humanity — and no other actor I’ve ever worked with ever brought it like
that, not at that level.”
Mr. Hoffman was born on July 23, 1967,
in Fairport, N.Y., a suburb of Rochester. His mother, the former
Marilyn Loucks, is a former family court judge. His father, Gordon,
worked for the Xerox Corporation. His parents, who divorced when Philip
was young, survive him. In his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards
in 2006, Mr. Hoffman thanked many people, but in particular his mother,
now known as Marilyn O’Connor, who attended. He thanked her for raising
him and his three siblings on her own and for taking him to see his
first play.
“Be proud, Mom, ‘cause I’m proud of you, and we’re here tonight, and it’s so good,” he said with a smile.
Mr.
Hoffman’s other survivors include a brother, Gordon, a screenwriter who
wrote “Love Liza,” a 2002 film starring Mr. Hoffman as a man living
through the aftermath of his wife’s suicide; and two sisters, Jill
Hoffman DelVecchio and Emily Hoffman Barr; his longtime partner, Mimi
O’Donnell, a costume designer who is the current artistic director of
the Labyrinth Theater Company; and their three children, Cooper,
Tallulah and Willa.
Mr. Hoffman became an actor in high school
after a wrestling injury halted his athletic aspirations. He played
Radar in a school production of “MASH,” a performance that was skilled
enough that the school’s drama director decided to put on “Death of a
Salesman”; in 1984, as a senior, he played Willy Loman. After
graduating, he spent a summer at the Circle in the Square Theater School
in Manhattan and later graduated from the New York University Tisch
School of the Arts.
Mr. Hoffman’s other notable film roles
included one of two brothers (Ethan Hawke was the other) who contrive to
rob their parents’ jewelry store, a crime that goes grotesquely wrong,
in Sidney Lumet’s 2007 thriller “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”;
the renegade rock critic Lester Bangs in Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous”
(2000); a rogue disc jockey in “Pirate Radio” (2009); and the campaign
manager of a politician in “The Ides of March” (2011).
His
principal works in progress were “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1”
and “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2,” in which he plays the head
game-maker Plutarch Heavensbee. He had largely finished on the first
film, but was scheduled for seven more shooting days on the second,
according to a person who was briefed on the situation and spoke on
condition of anonymity because of confidentiality strictures.
The
films, directed by Francis Lawrence, are set for release by Lionsgate,
the first on Nov. 21 of this year, the second on Nov. 20, 2015.
As
a director, Mr. Hoffman worked with Stephen Adly Guirgis, a Labyrinth
colleague, on several well-received Off Broadway plays, including “In
Arabia We’d All Be Kings,” “Jesus Hopped the A Train,” “Our Lady of
121st Street” and “The Little Flower of East Orange” — all tempestuous
works about urban life — and a fantasy biblical discourse, “The Last
Days of Judas Iscariot.”
Also for Labyrinth, he played the title
role in Robert Glaudini’s “Jack Goes Boating,” about the tentative love
life of a pot-smoking limousine driver; Mr. Hoffman reprised the role in
a 2010 adaptation, a film he also directed.
Labyrinth members
were in a state of shock yesterday. “I had no indication at all,” the
actor Felix Solis said in an interview. “He was our hero; he was our
leader.”
On Sunday afternoon outside the building where Mr.
Hoffman died, more than 100 people had gathered to mourn. The body was
removed at about 6:40 p.m.; police officers formed a barricade to
prevent people from taking pictures.
“He’s a local — he’s a
fixture in this neighborhood,” said Christian McCulloch, who said he
lived nearby. “You see him with his kids in the coffee shops. He is so
sweet. It’s desperately sad.”
