Philip Seymour Hoffman dead

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Mr. Hoffman with Catherine Keener in the 2005 film “Capote.”



As Iago in “Othello,” with John Ortiz and Jessica Chastain.




In the 2012 film “The Master,” with Amy Adams, left.




As Father Flynn with Meryl Streep in “Doubt” from 2008.




As Oakland Athletics’ manager Art Howe in “Moneyball.” Melinda Sue Gordon/Columbia Pictures




With Laura Linney in the 2007 film “The Savages.”




As C.I.A. agent Gust Avrakotos with Tom Hanks in “Charlie Wilson’s War.”




On the stage in “True West” in 2000.




With Willem Dafoe, Rachel McAdams and director Anton Corbijn at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

[Front-Ranger]

I was just listening yesterday to a radio news story about a strain of heroin that is 50 to 100 times stronger than regular heroin that has been appearing in the NE and has caused dozens of deaths already.

[CellarDweller]

How awful.  Thoughts and prayers go out to his family, his children must be devastated.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2014/02/philip_seymour_hoffman_death_remembering_an_actor_who_could_do_everything.html


PSH, RIP

Philip Seymour Hoffman
could do anything—and
he was just getting started.
By Dana Stevens
FEB. 3 2014 6:48 AM


Philip Seymour Hoffman at the 2012 Venice Film Festival.


I just saw Philip Seymour Hoffman last week, at a Q&A after the Sundance premiere of John Slattery’s feature directing debut God’s Pocket, in which Hoffman plays a low-level Philadelphia mobster trying to raise money for his son’s funeral. (It was one of two new films Hoffman was at the festival to promote; in the other, an adaptation of John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man, he plays a German spy on the trail of a suspected terrorist.) Hoffman came up on stage with the director and some fellow cast members, looking hale and hearty, and answered the audience’s questions not only cogently but warmly and humorously, with affectionate asides to Slattery and his co-stars (who included Christina Hendricks and John Turturro). He was standing right there just a second ago, in body and spirit and a goofy-looking pair of parachute pants, and now he’s gone.

I mention this only to convey the intensity of my sense—of everyone’s, I think—that Philip Seymour Hoffman died when he was right in the middle of something, or of a lot of things, all subsumed under the work in progress called “life.” At 46, he was both one of the most accomplished working actors in America and one of the busiest. He had reached a kind of sun-dappled meadow in his professional life, a place where he was powerful enough to take on any role he chose—an arms-trading supervillain in Mission: Impossible III, an enigmatic cult leader in The Master, a maniacal theater director in Synecdoche, New York, a working-class thug in God’s Pocket—and in sufficient control of his gifts to bring something unexpected and beautiful to every one. In the past few years, he had begun to direct films as well as act in them (his debut was 2010’s Jack Goes Boating, in which he also starred) while continuing to work extensively as a stage actor and director, both on Broadway and, for many years, as the artistic director of the Labyrinth Theater Company, which he co-founded. Hoffman also recently directed stage productions in Chicago and Sydney, and had just signed on for a lead role in an upcoming Showtime series. If you walked around New York’s West Village with any regularity, you could be sure to see him riding a bike down Bleecker Street.

So there’s the fact that an active, omnipresent actor like Hoffman is somehow suddenly as absent as a person can get—and then, before we can even start to get our minds around that, there’s the matter of how he left. This vibrant, wildly gifted performer, a father to three young children with his longtime partner and creative collaborator Mimi O’Donnell, losing his life alone on the floor of a Manhattan bathroom with a needle in his arm—it’s an image the mind skitters away from, as if in an attempt to convince us it’s only a scene from one of his movies (in which he would, naturally, have been superb). If Philip Seymour Hoffman can die of an overdose, then anyone can. If his death doesn’t serve as a wakeup call for “high-functioning” addicts, then nothing will (and as we keep painfully learning over and over again, sometimes nothing does).

When Hoffman was in a movie, you knew there would be at least one thing to recommend it—usually more than one, because he tended to choose oddball, interesting projects and, when they were less than perfect, to elevate them with the commitment and craft his presence always ensured. He could turn a small part in a dumb movie into a Bonsai-scale character portrait (cf. the gonzo weather nerd he played in 1996’s Twister, a ridiculous action thriller that I secretly adore, in large part because of the glee with which PSH sells its demented tornado-chasing premise). When he had a small part in a good movie, like the lovelorn, closeted, painfully needy Scotty in Boogie Nights, you left the theater remembering him as one of the film’s key players no matter how many lines his character had. And when he got a crack at a great leading role—Willy Loman, Truman Capote, the Master—he could turn in a performance so definitive, so nuanced and mysterious, that it was a struggle to imagine the part ever belonging to anyone else.

He could be equally plausible as an exemplar of Falstaffian bluster (The Master, Charlie Wilson’s War) or abject self-disgust (Synecdoche, New York, Boogie Nights.) He could minister to a dying old man with the tenderest care (Magnolia) or drip with icy homophobic contempt (The Talented Mr. Ripley). He could play the famously fey Truman Capote (Capote) without queening it up. 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. But he didn’t transform in the manner of, say, a Christian Bale, by slimming down, bulking up, donning prostheses and voice filters, becoming “unrecognizable.” Rather, he sculpted his characters from the pliant clay of the voice and body he already had, making himself lumbering and clumsy in one role, sinuous and self-contained in the next.

Accomplished as he already was, Hoffman’s career nonetheless had a distinct feeling of being nearer its beginning than its end—he was the opposite of an artist in decline. It’s easy to imagine him performing into his 80s, challenging himself and surprising us in ever-different ways as he grew older, playing Winston Churchill or Falstaff or Captain Ahab or King Lear, directing and producing both for the stage and the screen, mentoring younger actors. That we’ll never get a chance to watch that lifelong creative flowering makes me want to destroy a roomful of furniture with the cold, methodical rage Hoffman’s betrayed jewel thief displayed in Sidney Lumet’s final film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. It’s a bravura moment that seems to cite the famous room-destruction scene in Citizen Kane, but with a performance that, in some ways, surpasses Welles’. For years to come—as long as I’m still around to watch movies, which right now feels like a very lucky position to be in—I’ll see other actors playing roles that should have belonged to Hoffman, and feel his loss anew.

I kept thinking, after hearing the news, about Owning Mahowny (2003), in which Hoffman played a gambling-addict bank manager who swindles vast quantities of cash from his workplace to fund his binges at the casino. His Dan Mahowny is a monomaniacal, borderline sociopathic user of other people, a charmless and joyless man rapidly circling the financial and ethical drain. But Hoffman plays him with a deep compassion and ruthless honesty that turns this modestly ambitious torn-from-the-headlines biopic into a lacerating study of the compulsion to self-destruct. Owning Mahowny is a movie I’ve recommended to many people over the decade since it came out, and one I think of often when confronted by the awful mystery of addiction. Why and how is it that so many people are willing to sacrifice their dearest treasure—their work, their gifts, their families, their precious remaining years on earth—for another dose of the poison that’s slowly (or, sometimes, suddenly) killing them? Knowing what we do now about Hoffman’s own struggles with addiction, and his final, terrible answer to that question, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to watch Owning Mahowny again.

[delalluvia]

Latest story says they found fifty - 50! - bags of heroin in his apartment.     Was he living separate from his GF and kids?  Had a bolt hole so he could do his drugs?

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Latest story says they found fifty - 50! - bags of heroin in his apartment.     Was he living separate from his GF and kids?  Had a bolt hole so he could do his drugs?

Yes. He moved out of the family's Jane Street apartment about six weeks ago and had been living in a rental two blocks away. That's where he died, in the rental on Bethune Street, between Washington and Greenwich Streets.

It's really terrible. He had been with his girlfriend 14 years, and their children are 10, 7 and 5. Beyond horrible.

[delalluvia]

Yes. He moved out of the family's Jane Street apartment about six weeks ago and had been living in a rental two blocks away. That's where he died, in the rental on Bethune Street, between Washington and Greenwich Streets.

It's really terrible. He had been with his girlfriend 14 years, and their children are 10, 7 and 5. Beyond horrible.

So tragic. 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/02/philip-seymour-hoffmans-genius.html

PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN’S GENIUS
POSTED BY RICHARD BRODY
FEBRUARY 2, 2014




Philip Seymour Hoffman gave one of the greatest onscreen performances that anyone ever gave, in “The Master”; he won an Oscar for “Capote”; from 1991 until now, he acted in what IMDb reckons as sixty-three filmed productions; in recent years, he gathered accolades virtually every time his feet hit the boards of a stage or his face caught the light in a camera; and he began a career as a director. Today, he died, at the age of forty-six, reportedly from a drug overdose. The intimate agony—his partner lost a partner, his children lost a father, his friends lost a friend—is unspeakable except by those who knew and loved him. For those who didn’t know him personally (I never met him), the horror is inseparable from art—the love of his performances, the acknowledgment that there’s nothing more of them beside what’s in the can, and the sense that the torment and the talent are inseparable.

Work that’s only good is limited to its technique; when it’s great, a work is virtually inseparable from the artist’s life because it gives the sense of being the product of a whole life and being the absolute and total focus of that life at the time of its creation. The most depressing thing about “The Master”—in which the art of the director and the actors converged with a rare, white-hot fury from beginning to end—is, now, its basis in substance abuse. The movie begins with the traumatized, transient veteran, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), fleeing the scene of a likely crime (his homemade alcoholic concoction killed a co-worker on a farm) to stow away on a yacht. The vessel’s owner, Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), seems, at first, merely a bombastic grandee but turns out to be the charismatic leader of a cult. What seals their bond—what transforms Freddie from a mere intruder to a suddenly necessary member of Dodd’s entourage—is the incendiary drink. Dodd’s visionary fires and rage for power are fuelled by the poisonous cocktail that Freddie provides. And Dodd’s intense, tormented, and tormenting self-control is tested all the more by the universal solvent of inhibition. His liberation and his constraint, his attempt to create dependents and his own dependency, are inseparable.

In the tension between flamboyance and rigor, between the flagrant imperatives of power and the intense self-discipline that concentrates it, Hoffman made his own prodigious, sometimes overly conspicuous theatrical prowess the very subject of the film. With terrifying speculations regarding the supreme performer’s motives, he thrust his art and his life, his public face and his sense of identity, into the balance. Plenty of great artists plumb the soul’s depths without recourse to drugs or alcohol, but it’s naïve to discount the connection between artistic ecstasies, self-surpassing exertions, uncommonly powerful desires, and altered states of consciousness.

The controversy over “The Wolf of Wall Street” also involves the allure of drugs; though the movie makes it pretty clear that the character Jordan Belfort acts monstrously under their influence, it also leaves little doubt regarding the pleasures and powers that they provide him and his cohorts. It also suggests the poison pill of imagination, the diabolical—even self-destructive—power of theatrical rhetoric, its eruption from the depths of a soul that hardly dares to consider itself. Hoffman, with his seemingly infinite range of possibilities and self-transformations, was at the diametrically opposite end of the spectrum: he couldn’t help but look at himself, from angles he had never anticipated and in aspects he might not otherwise have fathomed. Genius, whether at its most constructive or destructive, its most sublime or its most repugnant, is unnatural; Hoffman lived for great art, and it’s impossible to escape the idea that he died for it. The complete price of his nearly superhuman ability has yet to be reckoned.

[Mandy21]

Was and still am ridiculously sad to hear this news Sunday afternoon.  Unfathomable loss.  I loved and relished him in every role he played.  Couldn't take my eyes off him.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/nyregion/a-complicated-actor-philip-seymour-hoffman-in-his-last-days.chtml


N.Y. / Region

A Complicated Actor,
Philip Seymour Hoffman,
in His Last Days.

By MICHAEL WILSON
FEB. 5, 2014


A father with his children in a Greenwich Village playground. A disheveled man hovering around the lone A.T.M. in a grocery store, withdrawing the exact sum of $200, over and over, for an hour. A guy texting his buddy to invite him over to watch the Knicks game at his apartment.

The text message would be the last known communication from Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose last hours and days were a jerking and complicated blend of business, socializing, furtive drug deals and, finally, what appeared to be a fatal overdose of heroin: His cold, lifeless body was found Sunday morning on a bathroom floor, a needle still stuck in his arm.

He died, by all accounts, an addict’s death, with periods of outward normalcy interrupted by erratic behavior. Shooting a blockbuster film. Business meetings. Ballgames. Binge drinking. Drug buys.

For a man who died alone at 46, his journey there was anything but private. He was an ambassador of sorts for Greenwich Village, a common sight to neighbors as he pushed a stroller, smoked a cigarette on a stoop or offered directions to a lost tourist. In short, a regular New Yorker — just one with an Oscar statuette on his shelf.

His final days were no different. He was far from a recluse. People saw him all over the Village and beyond. The return home last week of an apparently drunken Mr. Hoffman from Atlanta, where he was shooting scenes for the coming “Hunger Games” films, did not go unnoticed, with witnesses recounting run-ins with the actor at two different airports.



Mr. Hoffman attended a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah on Jan. 19.


He seemed reticent and rumpled at his last public appearance, promoting the films “God’s Pocket” and “A Most Wanted Man” at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah on Jan. 19. Friends, however, would later point out that Mr. Hoffman would often appear that way, as if he had been out partying all night when in fact he had just awaked from a night’s sleep.

At Sundance, a magazine publisher who did not immediately recognize him asked him what he did. Mr. Hoffman replied, “I’m a heroin addict.”

Elsewhere, he was his usual self.

“I saw him and said hello to him,” said Howard Cohen, a president of Roadside Attractions, the distributor that brought “A Most Wanted Man” to the festival. “He was very gracious and friendly and said, ‘I’m happy to do it.’ It was a very normal interaction.” Elsewhere at the festival, Mr. Hoffman spoke of having little time to see movies lately, but said he had enjoyed “Frozen” with his children.

He returned to New York, where he lived alone in a rented apartment on Bethune Street after having moved out from the Jane Street home of his companion, Mimi O’Donnell, and their three children.

Mr. Hoffman had admitted to a drug relapse at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in December, where a leader asked if those in attendance were counting their time sober in terms of years, months, weeks or days. Mr. Hoffman said, “I am counting days,” according to a person at the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the group’s rules.

“He raised his hand and he said his name and he said he had 28 days or 30 days sober,” the person said. Mr. Hoffman was clean-shaven and well dressed. “He looked great, he looked totally, totally normal.”

It was a struggle he took seriously. “Phil was sober for over 25 years and conquered it to the greatest degree one can, given the nature of it,” said David Bar Katz, a playwright and friend who was one of the first two people to discover Mr. Hoffman dead. “He was against every aspect of drug use.”



David Bar Katz


At the end of that week, on Jan. 25, a writer, Tatiana Pahlen, was leaving the 92nd Street Y after a swim when she ran into Mr. Hoffman at the elevator, picking up one of his children. The two had met a couple of years earlier, when he performed a reading at Joe’s Pub for a party for the magazine Lapham’s Quarterly. A similar event was coming up in two days.

“I asked him if he’s joining us on Monday,” Ms. Pahlen said. “He said, ‘Oh, no, I will be in Atlanta.’ ” She said he seemed happy, if “a little hyper,” and noted that “his skin was not healthy; his skin was in very bad shape.”

He arrived in Atlanta last week to shoot scenes for the final “Hunger Games” film, due in 2015. A diner photographed Mr. Hoffman sitting in a bar in downtown Atlanta, but it is unclear, from the photo, what was in his glass.

As Mr. Hoffman returned from Atlanta, his condition was such that Theresa Fehr, a home warranties executive based in Houston, mistook him for “a street person.”

Ms. Fehr was flying home, like the actor, from Atlanta that day. She noticed a man — not immediately recognizing him — being escorted to the security checkpoint by a Transportation Security Administration agent. “I just thought it was really odd that this street person was at the airport,” she said. “He put his shoes on the belt and just threw his belt there. You could tell he was very intoxicated.”

She turned to the agent and said, “ ‘You know, it’s funny, he looks like that actor that has three names.’ She looks at me and goes, ‘Yeah, it is.’ He’s trying to put his belt on. His pants are about to fall off and his belly is hanging out. I said, ‘Dude, I hope you don’t lose your pants.’ He just kind of looked at me with this dazed, glazed look,” she said.

After the flight to La Guardia Airport — during which he was photographed, again by a stranger, slumped over in his seat — he was driven away from the gate in a motorized cart.

“He passed me and my fiancée,” said Andrew Kirell, editor of Mediaite, a blog that covers the media. “It was remarkable how awful he looked.” They recognized him right away: “My fiancée and I are huge fans.”



Mr. Hoffman got an espresso at Chocolate Bar coffee shop [on 8th Avenue] on Saturday morning.


By Saturday morning, Mr. Hoffman was back on track, it seemed, showing up for his standing order — a four-shot espresso — at Chocolate Bar. Theater artists who had spoken with him last week said that he was preoccupied with some future film possibilities and a coming series for Showtime. He was to return to Atlanta the next week. His playwright friend, Mr. Katz, had texted him about getting together for one of their frequent steak and coffee dinners before he left.

Later that day, Mr. Hoffman met Ms. O’Donnell and their children at a playground, said a theater executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private activities of the family. The police later said that Ms. O’Donnell described Mr. Hoffman as high when she spoke to him at some point on Saturday.

Around 5 p.m., Paul Pabst, executive producer of “The Dan Patrick Show,” a sports program, was walking in the Village with members of his family when he saw Mr. Hoffman. His sister called out to the actor, who turned and gave her a high-five. “My sister looked at me and said, ‘Wow, he didn’t look good,’ ” Mr. Pabst later said on the program. “He looked out of it.”

Mr. Hoffman had dinner around 7:30 at Automatic Slim’s [NE corner of Washington and Bank Streets], a popular West Village bar where he was a regular, sitting on this night with two other men. The bar was closing for a private party at 9:30, but by then Mr. Hoffman was long gone.



Automatic Slim’s, a West Village bar where Mr. Hoffman had dinner with two men on Saturday night.



D’Agostino Grocery Store Mr. Hoffman  withdrew $1,200 from an A.T.M. on Saturday night.



The police said he withdrew $1,200 from the A.T.M. at D’Agostino, a grocery near his apartment, in six transactions of $200 each. There were gaps of several minutes between withdrawals, lasting about an hour in all.

He sent his friend, Mr. Katz, a text at 8:44 p.m. that read, “you wanna watch the second half of the knick heat game at Bethune,” Mr. Katz said.

Fourteen minutes later, at 8:58, Mr. Hoffman sent another text: “like 10:15.”

But Mr. Katz said he did not see the invitation until more than an hour later. At 11:30 p.m., after first seeing the texts, Mr. Katz texted Mr. Hoffman: “just got out of dinner. Where r u?”

There was no reply.

 


Mr. Hoffman's Apartment Mr. Hoffman’s body was removed from his apartment on Sunday.



A crowd gathered in front of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s apartment building in Greenwich Village on Sunday,
after he was found dead.



A makeshift memorial outside the apartment building where the body of Philip Seymour Hoffman was found.


Reporting was contributed by J. David Goodman, Patrick Healy, Colin Moynihan, Sarah Maslin Nir, Melena Ryzik and Alex Vadukul.