“I don’t want to repeat myself,” Philip Seymour Hoffman once said. And his career in film and theatre were testament to his flavoursome persona.
From his empathetic depiction of male nurse Phil Parma in Magnolia (1999) to his nuanced performance as author Truman Capote in Capote (2005), Hoffman was a rare yet luminous star.
His portrayal in Capote was ranked as 35 on Premiere Magazine’s 100 Greatest Performances of All Time in the year 2006, according to aceshowbiz.com.
The Academy Award-winning actor’s life met a tragic end on February 2, when he was found dead in his Manhattan apartment in what a New York police source described as an apparent drug overdose, reports Reuters.
Hoffman, 46, was discovered unresponsive on the bathroom floor of his Greenwich Village apartment by police responding to a 911 call, and Emergency Medical Service workers declared him dead on the scene.
A police spokesman said investigators found Hoffman with a syringe in his arm and recovered two small plastic bags in the apartment containing a substance suspected of being heroin.
CNN, citing a law enforcement official, reported that Hoffman was last seen alive at 8pm on Saturday. He had been expected to pick up his children on Sunday, but failed to show up, prompting playwright David Katz and another person to go to his apartment, where they found him dead.
Hoffman, who is survived by three children with his partner Mimi O’Donnell, had detailed his struggles with substance abuse in the past.
Two years before he began his career in film, he went to rehab for drugs and alcohol addiction after graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
“We are devastated by the loss of our beloved Phil and appreciate the outpouring of love and support we have received from everyone,” Hoffman’s family said in a statement issued through his publicist.
People who worked closely with him described him as a power-packed stage performer, who sometimes got absorbed in the roles he played to an extreme and worrying degree, reports latimes.com.
“He was ferocious and deeply embedded in the characters he played to the point of a real inability to leave those characters behind,” shared Robert Falls, who is the artistic director of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.
For his work on Broadway, Hoffman won three Tony Award nominations. He co-founded the Labyrinth Theatre Company in 1992, where he served as artistic director for years.
He won an Academy Award for his role in Capote and nominations as best supporting actor for The Master in 2013, Doubt in 2009 and Charlie Wilson’s War in 2008.
To say that he is no more may be inapt. He’s a traveller, an investigator (as he said so himself once). His work will forever live in the hearts of his fans, whose love he garnered with stellar performances on both stage and screen.
To pay homage to the fine actor, we have compiled a Hoff-fact sheet from IMDb and aceshowbiz.com:
1. Nickname: Phil
2. Famous as: Actor
3. Birth date: July 23, 1967
4. Birthplace: Fairport, New York, USA
5. Claim to fame: Scotty J, Boogie Nights (1997)
6. Favourite film: Goodfellas (1990)
7. Favourite actors: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken
8. Worked as a waiter, lifeguard and stock worker at a grocery store before his acting career took off
9. Said he would probably be a teacher had he not been an actor
10. Had only one week of shooting left for his role Plutarch Heavensbee in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2
Published in The Express Tribune, February 4th, 2014.
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