To play Truman Capote – a diminutive gay man with a high baby voice and ornate gestures – the stocky, deep-voiced performer seemed actually to shrink and levitate.
Movie lovers have so many other memories of Hoffman to cherish: as the priest who may or not be a pedophile in Doubt as a tradition-bound baseball manager in Moneyball as a man suffering from depression and dealing with an elderly father slipping into dementia in The Savages as the tell-it-like-it-is rock critic Lester Bangs in Almost Famous and, of course, as the outré author of In Cold Blood in Capote, for which Hoffman won an Oscar for best actor in 2005.
He also co-founded the Labyrinth Theater Company in NY and served for many years as artistic director. Among them, he played James Tyrone Jr in Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night and one of the raging brothers (opposite John C Reilly, the two of them alternating roles for added challenge) in Sam Shepard’s black comedy True West. Barely into middle age, the star had worked on over 50 movies in his 25-year career, while on stage he had appeared in some of the meatiest roles in the theatre. Broadway theatregoers will certainly remember the uniquely weary, disillusioned Willy Loman he became in Mike Nichols’s fine 2012 revival of Death of a Salesman.Ĭritics, essayists and photo editors are now pulling together lists of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s greatest performances and bemoaning the fact that it is impossible to narrow the list to anything approaching manageability. Connoisseurs of Hoffman’s glorious collaborations with filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson – including Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia – may still have a vivid image of the actor most recently as the charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd in The Master. Younger viewers worldwide may only know Hoffman as head gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Hoffman was a modest man deeply admired by audiences for the range of movie and theatre roles he embraced, honoured by critics for the fearlessness and integrity with which he inhabited his characters and loved by everyone for the soulfulness – and a certain kind of unsentimental existential weariness – with which he imbued whatever man he became. The loss is terrible.īut the pain is also intensified by collective heartfelt mourning for a great artist whose absence is felt so keenly. He leaves behind his long time partner, costume designer Mimi O’Donnell, and three young children. Hoffman was 46 years old and had recently relapsed after kicking drug addiction in his 20s and staying clean for two decades.
The outpouring of grief at the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman on 2 February is deepened by the awful circumstances of the event: found, according to police reports, in an apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village with a syringe in his arm and an envelope of what appeared to be heroin nearby, the actor died of an apparent drug overdose.