The outpouring of grief at the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman on 2 February is deepened by the awful circumstances of the event: found, according to police reports, in an apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village with a syringe in his arm and an envelope of what appeared to be heroin nearby, the actor died of an apparent drug overdose. Hoffman was 46 years old and had recently relapsed after kicking drug addiction in his 20s and staying clean for two decades. He leaves behind his long time partner, costume designer Mimi O’Donnell, and three young children. The loss is terrible.
But the pain is also intensified by collective heartfelt mourning for a great artist whose absence is felt so keenly. Hoffman was a modest man deeply admired by audiences for the range of movie and theatre roles he embraced, honoured by critics for the fearlessness and integrity with which he inhabited his characters and loved by everyone for the soulfulness – and a certain kind of unsentimental existential weariness – with which he imbued whatever man he became. Younger viewers worldwide may only know Hoffman as head gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Connoisseurs of Hoffman’s glorious collaborations with filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson – including Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia – may still have a vivid image of the actor most recently as the charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd in The Master. Broadway theatregoers will certainly remember the uniquely weary, disillusioned Willy Loman he became in Mike Nichols’s fine 2012 revival of Death of a Salesman.