The death of Philip Seymour Hoffman hurts like few recent celebrity passings I can think of. Well, like one of them: the death last summer of James Gandolfini. Both Hoffman and Gandolfini were fantastic actors, the sort of faces who’d make you say, “Hmm, maybe I’ll have to see that,” when they popped up in trailers. Both doted on their young children, and it stings to think about them right now.
But Gandolfini, for all his greatness, will forever be linked to one role. He spent eight years playing Tony Soprano, and that was after a couple years of typecasting as Italian-American Tough Guy No. 6. If you comb through social media today, you see movie fans tearing up over Hoffman and rarely focusing on any one role. The man could play psychopathic toughs (Mission Impossible III), frustrated artists (Synecdoche, New York), sociopathic intellectuals (The Master), gay intellectuals (Capote), gay spazes (Boogie Nights) slobs (Along Came Polly), and jerks (Hard Eight).
I was surprised to find this link at T19. I read the article, I read the NYT article, and I read the Wikipedia article. I still don’t know who this guy was, yet the coverage is everywhere.
I am mindful of how the funerals of JFK and Diana Spencer flooded the coverage of other important deaths off the front page. I am going to dig around the obits and see who’s missing.
#1, this seems to be a measure of how out of touch I am with popular culture. I didn’t recognize Hoffman’s face. I read the lists of his work; I haven’t seen any of it.
As described, this heroin death is a terrible waste of a considerable talent.
Damian Thompson had quite a thoughtful post, I thought.
It is hard to understand how so many young apparently gilded and successful careerists yet hide a secret, until suddenly it all comes crashing down tragically. Certainly it seems to affect a disproportionate number of actors and musicians. So very sad. I can think of at least one former addict who is quite clear that without God, he would be dead. In places the church can have a real impact in helping those who are in these chains.