Philip Seymour Hoffman

• 1. The Prediction

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  Philip Seymour Hoffman was an American actor whose career the director Joel Schumacher summed up in 2000 with bad news and good news. Schumacher put it this way: "The bad news is that Philip won't be a $25-million star. The good news is that he'll work for the rest of his life." The second half came true in full. Across a screen career of 22 years, Hoffman appeared in 55 films and one miniseries, and he kept returning to the stage. In 2024, a decade after he died, The Independent ranked him the greatest actor of the 21st century. How did an actor who never fit the mold of a movie star reach that standing? What pulled a boy who loved wrestling and baseball toward the theater? And what did his devotion to the craft cost him?

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• 2. Fairport to Tisch

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  Philip Seymour Hoffman was born on the 23rd of July 1967 in Fairport, a suburb of Rochester, New York. His mother, Marilyn O'Connor, grew up in nearby Waterloo. She started out as an elementary school teacher, became a lawyer, and eventually served as a family court judge. His father, Gordon Stowell Hoffman, came from Geneva, New York, and worked for the Xerox Corporation. Philip had a brother, Gordy, and two sisters, Jill and Emily. The family had Irish and German ancestry. Hoffman was baptized a Catholic and attended Mass as a child, though religion did not dominate the household. His parents divorced when he was nine, and his mother raised the children for the most part.

  Sports came first in his childhood, especially wrestling and baseball. Then, at age 12, he watched a stage production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons and was transfixed. Looking back in 2008, he said, "It was like a miracle to me." His mother was a lifelong theater enthusiast, and she began taking him to shows regularly. He later singled out two productions, Quilters and Alms for the Middle Class. The second starred a teenaged Robert Downey Jr.

  A neck injury at 14 ended his athletic life, and he began to think about acting. His mother encouraged him to join a drama club. He first committed to it because he was attracted to one of its female members. Soon the work itself took over. "I loved the camaraderie of it, the people, and that's when I decided it was what I wanted to do," he said.

  In 1984, at 17, he was selected for the New York State Summer School of the Arts in Saratoga Springs. There he met Bennett Miller and Dan Futterman, who would become future collaborators. Miller later recalled: "We were attracted to the fact that he was genuinely serious about what he was doing. Even then, he was passionate."

  Hoffman applied to several drama degree programs and was accepted to the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. After finishing at Fairport High School, and before Tisch began, he trained in the summer program at the Circle in the Square Theatre. At the university he supported himself by working as an usher, and he remembered those years fondly. With friends he co-founded an acting troupe called the Bullstoi Ensemble. He received his drama degree in 1989.

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• 3. Making Small Parts Count

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  Hoffman's screen debut came in 1991, in a Law & Order episode titled "The Violence of Summer". He played a man accused of rape. The next year he made his film debut in the independent picture Triple Bogey on a Par Five Hole, credited as "Phil Hoffman". Soon afterward he took his grandfather's name, Seymour, to avoid confusion with another actor. Between acting jobs he worked in customer service and in a delicatessen.

  Small parts arrived quickly, among them a studio production called My New Gun and a minor role in Leap of Faith, a comedy starring Steve Martin. The one that got him noticed was a spoiled private school student in Scent of a Woman, the Oscar-winning Al Pacino film. He auditioned five times for the part. Ryan Gilbey of The Guardian later said it let him "indulge his skill for making unctuousness compelling". The film earned US$134 million worldwide. Hoffman said, "If I hadn't gotten into that film, I wouldn't be where I am today." Afterward he quit the deli job to act full time.

  Through the early 1990s the parts stayed modest. He appeared in Joey Breaker and in My Boyfriend's Back, a teen zombie picture that critics panned. In Money for Nothing he played John Cusack's wealthy friend. In 1994 he was an inexperienced mobster in The Getaway, with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. He also appeared with Andy García and Meg Ryan in When a Man Loves a Woman. In Nobody's Fool he played an uptight deputy who gets punched by Paul Newman, one of his acting idols.

  By 1996 he was in one of the year's biggest blockbusters, Twister. He played a grubby, hyperactive storm chaser alongside Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. A People survey of Twitter and Facebook users found that Twister is the film most people connect with him.

  In 1998 he appeared in five films. Two of them, Montana and Next Stop Wonderland, failed commercially. Then he worked with the Coen brothers, whose films he had long admired, in The Big Lebowski. Hoffman played Brandt, the smug personal assistant to the title character, opposite Jeff Bridges and John Goodman. The part was small, yet he said it was the one for which people most often recognized him.

  Todd Solondz's black comedy Happiness gave him a far darker assignment. Hoffman played Allen, a sexually frustrated loner who makes obscene phone calls to women. Jake Coyle of the Associated Press rated Allen "one of the creepiest characters in American movies". The critic Xan Brooks, however, singled out the pathos Hoffman found in him. The film was controversial but widely praised. Hoffman closed the year as a medical student in the Robin Williams comedy Patch Adams, which critics panned but which became one of the highest-grossing films of his career.

  In 1999 Hoffman starred opposite Robert De Niro as the drag queen Rusty Zimmerman in Joel Schumacher's drama Flawless. He considered De Niro the most imposing actor he had worked with, and felt the experience profoundly improved his own acting. Critics noted how he avoided clichés in so delicate a role. Roger Ebert called him "one of the best new character actors". The part brought his first Screen Actors Guild Award nomination.

  Then came The Talented Mr. Ripley, which Hoffman called "as edgy as you can get for a Hollywood movie". He played a preppy bully who taunts Matt Damon's Tom Ripley. Meryl Streep, another of his idols, remembered her first glimpse of him: "I sat up straight in my seat and said, 'Who is that?' I thought to myself: My God, this actor is fearless."

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• 4. The Anderson Partnership

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  A brief part as a cocksure young craps player in Hard Eight, in 1996, began the most important collaboration of Hoffman's career. The writer-director was Paul Thomas Anderson, and Hard Eight was his first feature. He cast Hoffman on the strength of the work in Scent of a Woman.

  Boogie Nights, Anderson's second film, followed the Golden Age of Pornography with Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore and Burt Reynolds. Hoffman played a boom operator who tries to seduce Wahlberg's character. David Fear of Rolling Stone described the man as a "complete, unabashed loser" and praised the "naked emotional neediness" of the performance. Critics received the film warmly, and it grew into a cult classic. It is often cited as the role in which Hoffman first showed his full ability. He later called Anderson "incomparable".

  Magnolia unfolds over a single day in Los Angeles. Here Anderson gave Hoffman an unusually virtuous part, a nurse caring for Jason Robards' character, who is dying of cancer. The medical profession approved of the portrayal. Jessica Winter of the Village Voice considered it his most indelible work and likened him to a guardian angel. Magnolia has appeared on lists of the greatest films of all time, and it was a personal favorite of Hoffman's. For this film and The Talented Mr. Ripley, the National Board of Review named him Best Supporting Actor of the year.

  In 2002 came Punch-Drunk Love, where Hoffman appeared opposite Adam Sandler and Emily Watson as the supervisor of an illegal phone-sex operation. Drew Hunt of the Chicago Reader pointed to it as proof of his "knack for turning small roles into seminal performances". Hunt also praised his comic ability.

  Their fifth film together was The Master, in 2012. Hoffman played Lancaster Dodd, the charismatic leader of a young movement in 1950s America that resembles Scientology. Dodd takes a troubled man, played by Joaquin Phoenix, under his tutelage. Hoffman had been involved with the project for three years. He reviewed samples of the script for Anderson, and he suggested that Phoenix's character, Freddie Quell, should be the protagonist instead of Dodd.

  A talented dancer, Hoffman performed a jig during a surreal sequence. Peter Bradshaw called it an "extraordinary moment" that "only Hoffman could have carried off". Bradshaw judged it the most memorable performance of Hoffman's career. Drew Hunt agreed that it held his finest work: "He's inscrutable yet welcoming, intimidating yet charismatic, villainous yet fatherly." Hoffman and Phoenix shared the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival. Hoffman was also nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

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• 5. Life on Stage

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  Between March and July 2000, Hoffman gave 154 performances in a Broadway revival of Sam Shepard's True West. Every night he traded roles with his co-star John C. Reilly. Ben Brantley of The New York Times felt it was the best stage performance of Hoffman's career and called him "brilliant". It earned Hoffman a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play.

  Hoffman always treated the theater as fundamental. In 1995 he joined the off-Broadway LAByrinth Theater Company, and the tie lasted for the rest of his life. He directed, produced and acted in many of its productions. Later he became its co-artistic director, working alongside John Ortiz.

  Outside that home base he kept busy. In the spring of 1996 he appeared at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in Caryl Churchill's The Skriker. In March and April 1998 he made 30 appearances at the New York Theatre Workshop, playing an ex-heroin addict in a Mark Ravenhill play. A Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor followed in 1999, for the off-Broadway play The Author's Voice. In 2001 he joined Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman and John Goodman in Chekhov's The Seagull at the Delacorte Theater. Brantley found that performance less fully realized.

  As a director he earned two Drama Desk nominations for Outstanding Director of a Play. One was for Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train in 2001, and the other for Our Lady of 121st Street in 2003. In a 2008 interview he said that "switching hats" between acting and directing helped him improve at both.

  From April to August 2003, he appeared on Broadway in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, with Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Dennehy and Robert Sean Leonard. He played the alcoholic Jamie Tyrone. Director Robert Falls remembered the intensity: "Every night he ripped it up to an extent that he couldn't leave the role. Phil carried it with him." The performance brought his second Tony nomination, this time for Best Featured Actor in a Play.

  In 2009 he played Iago opposite Ortiz's Othello, in Peter Sellars' futuristic production. Reviews were mixed. Brantley called it "exasperatingly misconceived" and wrote that Hoffman's scheming came close to being spoiled by "genuine, volcanic fury".

  Jack Goes Boating began as a Robert Glaudini play that Hoffman had starred in and directed for LAByrinth in 2007. In 2010 it became his debut as a film director. He had meant only to direct, but he took the lead role of Jack, a lonely limousine driver looking for love, when the actor he wanted was unavailable. The film had a limited release and was not a high earner. Mark Kermode saw potential in his direction, while Dave Edwards of the Daily Mirror called it "a film so weak I could barely remember what it was about as I left". That same year Hoffman directed Brett C. Leonard's The Long Red Road at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Steven Oxman of Variety called it "heavy handed" and "predictable", but also "intriguing and at least partially successful".

  In the spring of 2012, Hoffman played Willy Loman in a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Andrew Garfield co-starred, and Mike Nichols directed. The production ran for 78 performances and became the highest-grossing show in the history of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Many critics felt that Hoffman, at 44, was too young for the 62-year-old Loman. He admitted the part was difficult, and it still earned him a third Tony nomination. It was the last time he appeared on a stage.

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• 6. Capote

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  To play Truman Capote, Hoffman lost a significant amount of weight and spent four months on research. He watched video clips of the author to absorb his voice and mannerisms. The 2005 film Capote dramatized the writing of Capote's true crime book In Cold Blood, published in 1966. Hoffman co-produced it as well as starring in the title role. He said he was not concerned with perfect imitation, but felt a great duty to "express the vitality and the nuances" of the writer. On set he never stepped out of character. "Otherwise," he explained, "I would give my body a chance to bail on me."

  The film was released to great acclaim, particularly for Hoffman. Many critics remarked that the role seemed designed to win awards, and it did. He received the Academy Award for Best Actor, along with a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a BAFTA and many critics' prizes. In 2006, Premiere magazine ranked it the 35th-greatest movie performance of all time.

  The same year as Capote, he earned his only Primetime Emmy Award nomination, for the HBO miniseries Empire Falls. He lost to his castmate Paul Newman. In 2006 he played the villainous arms dealer Owen Davian opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible III. A Vanity Fair journalist judged his villain "one of the most delicious in a Hollywood film since Alan Rickman's in Die Hard". The film grossed nearly US$400 million and put Hoffman in front of a mainstream audience.

  In 2007 he returned to independent films. In The Savages, he and Laura Linney played siblings who must place their father, played by Philip Bosco, in a care home because of dementia. Jake Coyle of the Associated Press called it "the epitome of a Hoffman film: a mix of comedy and tragedy told with subtlety, bone-dry humor, and flashes of grace". Hoffman received a Golden Globe nomination. He also appeared in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, the final film by the veteran director Sidney Lumet. There he played a realtor who embezzles from his employer to support a drug habit.

  Charlie Wilson's War, directed by Mike Nichols, gave him his second Academy Award nomination, again for portraying a real person. He played Gust Avrakotos, the CIA officer who worked with Congressman Charlie Wilson, played by Tom Hanks. Together they helped the Afghan Mujahideen fight the Soviet Union. Todd McCarthy wrote, "whenever he's on, the picture vibrates with conspiratorial electricity." Hoffman was also nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe.

  In 2008 he played Caden Cotard in Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. Caden is a frustrated dramatist who tries to build a scale replica of New York inside a warehouse. Critics divided sharply. Sonny Bunch of The Washington Times found the film "impressionistic, inaccessible, and endlessly frustrating", while Roger Ebert named it the best film of the decade. Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph believes Hoffman gave one of cinema's best performances.

  His second role that year was Father Brendan Flynn in Doubt, opposite Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. Flynn is a priest accused of sexually abusing a 12-year-old student in the 1960s. Hoffman already knew John Patrick Shanley's play, and he talked at length with a priest who had lived through that era. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian suspected the film of being Oscar bait. Even so, Hoffman earned a second consecutive Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars, the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes, plus a Screen Actors Guild nomination.

  In 2009 he lent his voice to Max, a reclusive New Yorker with Asperger syndrome, in the claymation film Mary and Max. An episode of the children's show Arthur brought a Daytime Emmy Award nomination. He also played a brash American disc jockey in Richard Curtis's The Boat That Rocked, a character based on Emperor Rosko of Radio Caroline. The critic David Thomson sensed indecision in this period. In his view, Hoffman seemed unsure whether to keep playing spectacular supporting roles or to become a lead who controls the emotional outcome of a film.

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• 7. Creeps and Misfits

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  "Even if I was hired into a leading-man part, I'd probably turn it into the non-leading-man part," Hoffman joked in 2002. That year he was given his first leading role, in Todd Louiso's Love Liza. His brother Gordy wrote the script, and Hoffman had read it at their mother's house five years earlier. It concerns a widower who sniffs gasoline to cope with his wife's suicide. Hoffman thought it the finest writing he had ever read, "incredibly humble in its exploration of grief". A BBC review said the film finally showed "what he's truly capable of". Few saw it, since the limited release earned only US$210,000.

  In Owning Mahowny, in 2003, he played a bank employee who embezzles money to feed a gambling addiction. It was based on Brian Molony, the Toronto banker who committed the largest fraud in Canadian history. Hoffman met Molony to play the role as accurately as possible. The Royal College of Psychiatrists approved his portrayal of addiction. Roger Ebert called the performance "a masterpiece of discipline and precision". The film earned little at the box office.

  By then critics were noticing a pattern. David Kamp of GQ likened Hoffman's film appearances to "discovering a prize in a box of cereal, receiving a bonus, or bumping unexpectedly into an old friend". In 2000 he had played the rock critic Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, studying the real man in a BBC interview. In 25th Hour, Spike Lee gave him the part of a teacher who makes a devastating drunken mistake. Lee said he had waited years to find the right role for him.

  Ryan Gilbey of The Guardian wrote that Hoffman's CV "was populated almost exclusively by snivelling wretches, insufferable prigs, braggarts and outright bullies". Xan Brooks said his particular talent was to "take thwarted, twisted humanity and ennoble it". Todd Louiso believed audiences connected with him because he looked like an ordinary man and revealed his vulnerability. Hoffman explained his choices in 2006: "I didn't go out looking for negative characters; I went out looking for people who have a struggle and a fight to tackle. That's what interests me."

  One writer called him "too pudgy to look romantic or heroic", yet Hoffman said he was grateful for his appearance because it made him believable in many roles. He knew he was often too unorthodox for Academy voters. "I'm sure that people in the big corporations that run Hollywood don't know quite what to do with someone like me, but that's OK," he said. In 2022, readers of Empire magazine voted him one of the 50 greatest actors of all time.

  He never assumed that work would keep coming. An anecdote from the early 2000s has a friend asking whether he was having any luck, and Hoffman quietly answering, "I'm in a film, Cold Mountain, that has just come out." Patrick Fugit, his young co-star in Almost Famous, remembered him as intimidating but an exceptional mentor. Hoffman admitted he sometimes took big studio films for the money, yet said his main goal was to do good work. To stay grounded, he tried to appear on stage once a year.

  In a 2012 interview he confessed: "The job isn't difficult. Doing it well is difficult." The author John le Carré met him during the adaptation of A Most Wanted Man. Le Carré praised his intelligence and intuition, then added: "It was painful and exhausting work, and probably in the end his undoing. The world was too bright for him to handle."

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• 8. The Final Years

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  Moneyball, released in the last third of 2011, reunited Hoffman with his Saratoga friend Bennett Miller, who directed it. Hoffman played Art Howe, manager of the Oakland Athletics in the 2002 season. Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post called him "perfectly cast". The real Art Howe accused the filmmakers of an "unfair and untrue" portrayal. The same season, George Clooney's The Ides of March cast Hoffman as the earnest campaign manager of a Democratic presidential candidate played by Clooney. His scenes opposite Paul Giamatti, as the rival campaign manager, drew praise, and the role earned his fourth BAFTA nomination.

  In A Late Quartet he played a violinist in a string quartet that faces a crisis when one member is diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir played the others. Stephen Holden of The New York Times called his performance "exceptional". In 2013 he joined the Hunger Games series as the gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee in Catching Fire. That film became the 10th-highest grossing in history up to that point, and a new generation of moviegoers came to know his face.

  In January 2014 he went to the Sundance Film Festival to promote two films. In A Most Wanted Man, directed by Anton Corbijn, he played a German intelligence officer. Xan Brooks praised a performance of "terrific, lip-smacking relish: full of mischief, anchored by integrity". In God's Pocket, the directorial debut of the actor John Slattery, he played a thief.

  Hoffman guarded his private life. In 2012 he said he would rather not discuss his family, because they had no choice in the matter. "The less you know about me the more interesting it will be to watch me do what I do," he said. He met the costume designer Mimi O'Donnell in 1999, while they worked on the play In Arabia We'd All Be Kings, which he directed. They were together for 14 years, lived in New York City, and had a son, Cooper, and two daughters. Publicly, he was known to have voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 and to have donated to Al Franken's Senate campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

  He was also open about a harder history. In a 2006 interview with 60 Minutes, he said that during his university years he had used "anything I could get my hands on. I liked it all." After graduating in 1989 he entered a rehabilitation program and stayed sober for 23 years. He relapsed in 2012, and in May 2013 he admitted himself to rehabilitation for about 10 days. Later, O'Donnell said that he moved to a nearby apartment to protect their children from the effects of the relapse.

  On the 2nd of February 2014, his friend David Bar Katz found Hoffman dead in the bathroom of his Manhattan apartment. He was 46. Friends said his drug use had been under control. Detectives found heroin and prescription medication at the scene. His death was ruled an accident, caused by "acute mixed drug intoxication, including heroin, cocaine, benzodiazepines, and amphetamine". The New York Times obituary called him "perhaps the most ambitious and widely admired American actor of his generation".

  His funeral Mass was held on the 7th of February 2014 at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in Manhattan. His body was then cremated, and the ashes went to his partner and children. In his will of October 2004, he left a fortune of around $35 million to Mimi O'Donnell, trusting her to provide for their children.

  Tributes came quickly. On the 5th of February, the LAByrinth Theatre Company held a candlelight vigil, and Broadway dimmed its lights for one minute. Three weeks after his death, Katz founded the American Playwriting Foundation in his memory. It was paid for by a libel suit against the National Enquirer, which had falsely claimed that Hoffman and Katz were lovers. The foundation gives an annual prize of $45,000 to the author of an unproduced play, called the Relentless Prize in honor of Hoffman's dedication. On the 16th of February, Cate Blanchett dedicated her BAFTA for Blue Jasmine to him. At the 90th Academy Awards, Sam Rockwell dedicated his Best Supporting Actor win for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri to Hoffman.

  His last films were still to come. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 arrived in November 2014, dedicated to his memory. He had been filming Part 2 and had completed most of his scenes, so the remaining two were rewritten. It was released in November 2015. He had also been preparing Ezekiel Moss, a Prohibition-era drama he would direct, with Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal. And he had filmed a pilot for the Showtime series Happyish, as an advertising executive. After his death, Steve Coogan was recast in the part.

  In 2022 a statue of Hoffman was unveiled in his hometown of Fairport. David A. Annand sculpted it, and the film producer James Declan Tobin commissioned it after befriending Hoffman's mother at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. In 2023 it was permanently installed outside the George Eastman Museum. Marilyn O'Connor, the woman who first took him to the theater, called it "a loving memorial" to her son.

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