Philip Seymour Hoffman, 1967–2014

Philip Seymour Hoffman kicked his youthful addictions to drugs and alcohol at the age of 22, before embarking on one of the most wide-ranging and universally admired acting careers of his age. But even after more than two decades of sobriety, he always knew that the battle wasn’t over. “Just because all that time’s passed doesn’t mean ‘Maybe it’s a phase,’” he told an interviewer in 2011. “That’s, you know, who I am.” A year later, he put himself back into rehab, and this week Hoffman was found dead with a needle in his arm in a Manhattan apartment containing 50 bags of heroin.

Despite the addiction problem that apparently killed him, Hoffman “was the opposite of an artist in decline,” said Slate.com. He had reached “a kind of sun-dappled meadow in his professional life,” where he could take on whatever challenge appealed to him. After winning the Best Actor Academy Award in 2006 for his portrayal of Truman Capote in Capote, Hoffman played a wide-ranging gallery of characters: the disgruntled CIA agent of Charlie Wilson’s War, the villainous arms trader in Mission: Impossible III, the eerily affable cult leader in The Master, even Willy Loman in a Broadway production of Death of a Salesman. “His unusual actorly physiognomy—the ruddy, transparent skin, the bulky but far from graceless body, the beetling blond eyebrows—lent itself to all manner of physical and gestural shape-shifting.” Hoffman seemed uniquely able to sculpt his characters “from the pliant clay of the voice and body he already had.”

Hoffman was born and raised in a suburb of Rochester, N.Y., the son of a Xerox executive and a family court judge who divorced when he was young, said The New York Times. He turned to acting in high school only after “a wrestling injury halted his athletic aspirations,” but his talent was so obvious that his high school drama teacher upgraded the school’s program to spotlight Hoffman’s prodigious gift. After graduating from New York University, he appeared “in more than 50 films in a career that spanned less than 25 years.”

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Hoffman made his film debut in 1991, “but he didn’t really break through until the late ’90s, with two striking performances that called for an actor unencumbered by vanity,” said Grantland.com. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, he played a pathetically lovelorn boom operator obsessed with a male porn star, which was funny until he’s rejected and “your heart breaks along with his.” In Todd Solondz’s Happiness he portrayed “a creep who makes obscene phone calls.” In both cases, Hoffman “seems to draw from a deeper well of empathy, imbuing these sad-sack creatures with a soulfulness that may not have been all there on the page.”

Hoffman “wasn’t strikingly handsome, nor strikingly unhandsome, neither thin nor obese, not blessed with any distinguishing gosh-wow feature,” said TheAtlantic.com. He could play larger-than-life characters like Plutarch Heavensbee, the game-designer in The Hunger Games series, for which he was still filming the two last installments. But his special gift was for finding “the quiet dignity in life-size characters—losers, outcasts, and human marginalia.” Many such figures, along with great older characters like King Lear or Winston Churchill, will now never be illuminated by Hoffman’s singular empathy.