![]() ![]() It was one of the peculiarities of Hoffman's skill that the more benevolent or affable his role, the more his natural idiosyncrasies seemed stymied. They first worked together on the director's debut, the thriller Hard Eight (1996).Īfter Boogie Nights, Anderson gave Hoffman a rare saintly role in the multi-character drama Magnolia (1999). That was his most fruitful creative partnership, spanning all but one of Anderson's six films. Boogie Nights was especially notable for cementing the actor's collaboration with the writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. These were the parts that established Hoffman's reputation. "He's given this awful character the respect he deserves, and made him fascinating." "This actor is fearless," said Meryl Streep of his work in the movie. It was one of the tricks of Hoffman's elegantly cruel performance that when Freddie met his bloody end, the audience was likely to feel relieved and complicit he was such a doggedly discomfiting presence, it was clear he could be stilled only by death. But as the pompous Freddie in The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), he deployed his body as a blunt instrument, butting in where he was not welcome. When he played sad-sacks riddled with self-loathing, such as the boom operator who squirms with unrequited love for a male colleague in Boogie Nights (1997), or an obscene phone-caller in Happiness (1998) who fails to make good on his threats when his bluff is called, he used his bulk to emphasise those characters' rancid unease. Built like a truck, and as dishevelled as a trucker, he used his frame and his unkemptness with immense dexterity. Doing it well is difficult." He told this paper that "just because you like to do something doesn't mean you have fun doing it and I think that's true about acting".įrom his first, minor supporting roles in the early 1990s, he proved the old saw that there are no small parts, only small actors – and he was small in neither sense of the word. The more pathetic or deluded the character, the greater Hoffman's relish seemed in rescuing them from the realms of the merely monstrous. He could take the most pitiful souls – his CV was populated almost exclusively by snivelling wretches, insufferable prigs, braggarts and outright bullies – and imbue each of them with a wrenching humanity. His speciality was the craven and the carbuncular. It was for screen acting alone that Hoffman was best known. He made his debut as a film director with a 2010 adaptation of Bob Glaudini's play Jack Goes Boating, in which he reprised his stage performance as the title character, a limousine driver edging tentatively toward romance. ![]() He was also an accomplished stage actor and director whose notable achievements included a 2000 Broadway production of Sam Shepard's True West, during which he and his co-star John C Reilly alternated parts, and co-founding Labyrinth, a non-profit theatre company. His rise in the 1990s coincided with the emergence of a new wave of American film-makers, and his versatile, volatile talent became integral to some of the most original US cinema of the past 20 years. His acting style was immune to the temptations of caricature. And, yes, he could also look splendidly odd, with his windbeaten thatch of sandy hair, porcine eyes and a freckled face that would glow puce and glossy with rage. ![]() He was a prolific and old-fashioned character actor, which is not a euphemism for "odd" – it means he could nail a part in one punch, summoning the richness of an entire life in the smallest gesture. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has died aged 46 of a suspected drugs overdose, had three names and 3,000 ways of expressing anxiety. ![]()
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