RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman

Sigh! What a complete shock and shame. PSH had decades ahead of him. Its just makes you want to scream out.

I just read this here and I'm shocked.

RIP Mr. Hoffman. You were one of the greats of our time.

http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-...184225678.html

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I am in shock. I was reading the news this morning as I always do and I couldn't believe it. A great loss from a seriously great actor.

Well. That sucks. Rest in Peace, Mr. Hoffman.

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Hoffman was nominated for four Oscars in his career. Three as Best Supporting Actor (The Master, Doubt, and Charlie Wilson's War) and once as Best Actor, in Capote, which of course he won for.




It's very difficult to rank his best work because he had so very much of it, and even in bad or forgettable movies, like Pirate Radio and Along Came Polly, he was always a joy to watch. But today, my list of favorite performances would look like...


1. Synecdoche, New York
2. The Savages
3. Capote
4. Doubt
5. Happiness
6. The Master
7. Owning Mahowny
8. Charlie Wilson's War
9. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
10. State & Main

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Damn. I really can't believe this. One of my favorite actors in some of my favorite movies. There was no one like him acting today and it's horrible that he will never be able to take another role.

R.I.P Philip Seymour Hoffman

I was actually planning on rewatching Scent of a Woman today for the sheer pleasure of watching one of my all-time favorite movies again.

It will now be a tribute to Hoffman.

I loved him in Doubt, The Big Lebowski, Boogie Nights, Almost Famous, and Punch Drunk Love. He was also really good in Pirate Radio and Mission Impossible 3.

What a waste of talent and life!

I just saw this and I'm stunned, very sad. He was my favorite actor working today. Oddly enough, my favorite performance of his was as a drug addict in Before the Devil Knows you're Dead.

RIP

What a shock! I had no inkling that he had that sort of problem and to find him gone at the height of his career is really sad. I first became aware of him in that dreadful flick Twister where he was a stoner-meteorologist. As awful as that movie was, I distinctly recall Hoffman, even though I didn't know anything about him yet. I'm sorry we lost him; he had a lot of good roles left.

This is just unreal. He was a damn good actor, not one of my personal favorites but I had respect for him. I think his best performance is either Magnolia or Capote.

Just watched Capote and his performance there is nothing short of fantastic, but his performance as Lancaster Dodd in The Master is still my personal favorite.


(Weirdly enough the actor that is playing John More in this scene also recently passed away)

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I'm honestly speechless

My jaw dropped, then my heart. PSH was a unique talent, a great actor who stood out in every film I've seen him in. Since first seeing him in Hard 8 I'd grown rather fond of his slightly quirky looks, his brilliance in mixing fierce emotion and humor to bring believably human characters to life.

A damn shame he's gone so soon.

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#31 on SC's Top 100 Mofos list!!

Another one in shock here, I was stunned to find this out-- I had no idea he had a problem with heroin. Very sad news, what a magnificent actor he was, RIP PSH

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such a shame. his works will live on.

HERE is a nice piece from Salon.com...

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Philip Seymour Hoffman: As great as Bogart?
He didn't expect to succeed in the movies and didn't enjoy fame, but became one
of the finest actors of our time

Monday, Feb 3, 2014
ANDREW O'HEHIR



I saw Philip Seymour Hoffman less than two weeks ago at Sundance, genially taking audience questions from the stage after the premiere of Anton Corbijn's film A Most Wanted Man, in which Hoffman plays a German counterintelligence agent in present-day Hamburg, trying to use a Chechen rebel to reel in a major financier of terrorism. The movie's a mixed bag, but Hoffman is its heart, soul, and intellect, giving a burdened, brooding, intensely physical performance as a Teutonic-bureaucrat version of Dirty Harry, a decent man who finally becomes aware he’s trapped by indecent circumstances. At the end of the film, Hoffman’s character leaves a car running in the middle of a Hamburg street and simply walks away.

Now Hoffman himself is gone, dead of an apparent drug overdose, leaving behind three children, heartbroken family and friends, and an acting career that had already achieved greatness but should have gone on a lot longer. I met Hoffman three or four times, but I only knew him in the sense that we all did, as one of the truest and finest craftspeople in the modern acting profession. He disappeared into every role and yet remained absolutely himself, an impossible, alchemical duality that only the best actors can manage. He understood when he needed to dominate a scene, or an entire film, as with the magnetic and deeply wounded title character of Capote (which won him his Oscar) or the charismatic, forceful and even erotic figure of Lancaster Dodd in The Master, crooning "Slow Boat to China" at Joaquin Phoenix (it's ridiculous that that was considered a supporting role). He also understood that secondary characters are there to serve the story and its stars, not to hog the spotlight or audition for their own movies. Do you even remember Hoffman as irascible Oakland A’s manager Art Howe in Moneyball, baffled by Brad Pitt's crazy ideas? Every second he's on screen is exquisite, but he never tries to make the movie about him.

For Hoffman, acting on stage or on screen was an art or craft to be pursued on its own terms, not a means to an end. His New York Times obituary, which I was deeply grieved to read on Sunday afternoon, called him "ambitious", and that was true in the sense that he worked immensely hard and took on all kinds of roles, always wanted to challenge himself and find out what he could do, and always sought to venture into unexplored corners within himself and the characters he played. It’s not accidental that so many of Hoffman’s screen characters are emotionally naked and desperate people, right on the knife edge that separates attractive from repulsive. In this country and this century we often understand ambition in terms of the marketplace, as a hunger for money or fame or power, and Hoffman had none of that kind.

I remember being in a conversational group around Hoffman after the premiere of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York at Cannes in 2008 (I don’t want to get sidetracked, but that movie is an underappreciated near-masterpiece, and features one of Hoffman's greatest roles, as a dying theater director whose magnum opus is either an imitation of the universe or its replacement). Hoffman was always reticent with the press, found it difficult to describe how he did his work, and obviously didn't love doing interviews. Ingeniously enough, someone got him talking about the reasons for that. He had never imagined becoming a movie actor, he explained, and didn't feel comfortable with the entire publicity machinery around the film business. "I always thought I'd be a New York theater actor, riding my bicycle to rehearsal," he said. "That was all I ever wanted." Maybe someone would recognize him once in a while at the grocery store, and tell him, "Oh! I loved you in that Chekhov play!"

Hoffman actually had a version of that career too, alongside his better-known career in the movies. He joined the nonprofit, off-Broadway LAByrinth Theater Company in 1995 — I assume that's where he met his longtime partner, Mimi O'Donnell, who is one of the company's directors — and directed or acted in numerous productions (here’s the Chekhov play: He was Konstantin in "The Seagull" in 2001). His three Tony nominations as an actor suggest his deep commitment to the classic works of American theater: Sam Shepard's "True West" in 2000, Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" in 2003 and Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" in 2012. But he arrived in New York theater in the opposite direction from most actors, so to speak. The movies claimed him first, and whatever his mixed feelings about the film business may have been, the camera loved him.

As every article about him this week will mention, Hoffman gave up his job slicing meat and cheese in a Manhattan grocery-store deli after he was cast in a minor supporting role in the 1992 drama Scent of a Woman, which is remembered today only because it mysteriously won Al Pacino an Oscar. He appeared in three other films that year, three more in 1993, and four in 1994, including a memorable scene with Paul Newman, his acting idol, in Nobody’s Fool (Newman punches him out). He never had to slice bologna again, and after his needy, vulnerable and unforgettable performance as Scotty, the boom operator with ill-fitting clothes and a mad crush on Mark Wahlberg in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, Hoffman became, after his own fashion, a movie star.

Although Hoffman didn't put it this way in the conversation I recall, I suppose he hadn't expected to become a successful movie actor because he wasn't buff or slender, and didn't fit conventional standards of handsome masculinity. But let's not give filmmakers and casting directors too much credit for courage: For want of a better word, Phil Hoffman was incandescent. Once you'd seen him, even in a small role in a movie destined for oblivion, you never forgot him. In another era he might have been a classic Hollywood character actor, playing villains and sidekicks and cuckolded husbands by the dozen. Scratch that — he might just as well have been a star. If he didn't have the bland, perfect good looks or impressive musculature required of today's romantic leading men, you could say the same about Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart or Jack Nicholson. It's too early to say these things, of course, but he may well be remembered as long as they are.

By my rough count, Hoffman has appeared in something like 34 films and 18 plays since the year 2000. We had no reason not to expect twice as many more in the 30 or 40 years ahead, and it's almost impossible to reckon with the fact that his prodigious flow of work has suddenly stopped dead (We will see him twice more as Plutarch Heavensbee, the game designer turned rebel of the Hunger Games series — and was his scene dancing with Jennifer Lawrence the highlight of that second movie or what?). What we know about his death is that it was a terrible private tragedy, and that's enough. Maybe it was just a disastrous drug relapse and maybe other personal factors or career pressures were involved, but I don't know and I don't have a right to know. Philip Seymour Hoffman loved to act — the record speaks for itself — but he never wanted to be a public figure. He wanted to show up for rehearsal on his bike, and do the work.

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Great posts Holden. My favourite film he's in is The Master, but his best performance in my eyes is Capote, after watching an interview with the real Capote, Hoffman's Capote has got to be one of the top portrayals of a real person ever. A small role that i love him for is Punch Drunk Love, his interactions with Sandler are hilarious in that film. Also who can forget Lester Bangs in Almost Famous .

Anyway RIP

And here's the obit from The New York Times

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Philip Seymour Hoffman, Actor of Depth, Dies at 46
November 2, 2014 By BRUCE WEBER




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 forty-six. 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 twenty-two. Last year he checked into a rehabilitation program for about ten days after a reliance on prescription pills resulted in his briefly turning again to heroin. "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 forty-four, 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 fifty films in a career that spanned less than twenty-five 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' 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' 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 November 21 of this year, the second on November 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."

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Hoffman and his character were, by far, the best thing in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War...


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