![]() He had two films in the can – Anton Corbijn’s thriller A Most Wanted Man and the crime drama God’s Pocket, directed by John Slattery – and was set to appear in the next two Hunger Games movies, rolling out over the next two years. “He was an actor’s actor.”ĩ Overlooked Philip Seymour Hoffman PerformancesĮven as he was struggling to get clean, Hoffman’s drive wouldn’t let him slow down. “He was the greatest of his generation, and more,” says Cameron Crowe, who directed him in Almost Famous. And here you have Phil standing up, saying, ‘Hey, I got something to say, too! It may not be pretty, but it’s true.’ That’s why we needed him so badly.”īy never phoning in even the smallest parts and always empathizing with a character’s vulnerabilities, Hoffman was often awarded, walking away with an Oscar for his spot-on portrayal of Truman Capote in 2005’s Capote Sidney Lumet, who directed him in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, once compared him to Marlon Brando (Hoffman, in typical fashion, scoffed at the compliment). “Phil was an unconventional movie star in an era where there’s no such thing as unconventionality,” says his friend Ethan Hawke. Ripley, the late rock critic Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, even the storm-chasing stoner in Twister. Regardless of what film he was in, it was impossible to not be haunted by the character he portrayed: the nurse in Magnolia, the tortured sound man in Boogie Nights, the rich snob in The Talented Mr. Hoffman, with his shock of strawberry-blond hair, pale-blue eyes and chunky physique, was the most recognizable anti-star Everyman in Hollywood, someone who by force of effort had willed himself into becoming a leading man. There was no dealing with the wayward artist.” It was the first sign of the private struggle of a man known to his many friends as a performer of ferocious discipline and seemingly limitless talent. “Whatever difficulties were going on then were not to be beheld,” recalls Glaudini. Few if any in the play had known anything was amiss. Two days after A Family for All Occasions opened, Hoffman checked himself into rehab after prescription drugs had triggered a relapse of his heroin use. “He had a Bill Clinton kind of energy.” But away from the show he was quietly losing control. ![]() “When he walked into a room, he didn’t have to say anything,” says a friend, Donovan Leitch. While Hoffman was working, he was always in complete command. Peter Travers on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Greatest Roles “Even after opening night, he said, ‘We’re still working – we’re still in rehearsal.'” “From the napkin holder on the dining room table, every minute detail was debated and thought out,” recalls the company’s managing director, Danny Feldman. With his trademark near-religious quest for perfection, Hoffman obsessed over every aspect of the production. ![]() In the intimate 90-seat theater, Hoffman – always dressed in one or another of his seemingly interchangeable baggy pants and sweaters – was relentlessly pushing the cast and crew of the play he was directing, A Family for All Occasions, a new work by his friend Bob Glaudini. Slouched in the front row of the labyrinth Theater Company’s performance space in New York’s West Village last May, Philip Seymour Hoffman was his typical focused, superdisciplined self. In honor of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final film, A Most Wanted Man, hitting theaters today, we are reprinting David Browne’s cover story on the actor’s final days from our February 27th issue. ![]()
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