The actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has died in New York aged 46. We look back over his career in clips
Philip Seymour Hoffman has died aged 46 in New York. Peter Bradshaw's tribute to the actor is here, and Simon Hattenstone recalls interviewing him in 2011. Here's 10 of the best from a virtuosic talent.*The Big Lebowski (1998)*
Ten great performances? Philip Seymour Hoffman produced scores of them, in both lead roles and supporting turns, splurging them out like a fountainhead. No shortlist worth its salt should ignore his brilliant early appearances in Nobody's Fool, Hard Eight or Boogie Nights. But, for the sake of brevity, let's start with his brief, delicious masterclass as Brandt, the gloriously obsequious PA to a boorish billionaire, in the Coens' freewheeling 1998 classic The Big Lebowski. So what if the script gave him few lines to work with? Hoffman's embarrassed, defensive chuckle played like a comic monologue in itself.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch
*Happiness (1998)*
Todd Solondz's pitch-black comedy installed East Coast suburbia as a circle of hell and sparked outrage with its depiction of a loving American dad (Dylan Baker) who abuses his pre-teen son's best friend. Hoffman skulked in the shadows as Allen, the local sex pest, who pines for his neighbour (Lara Flynn Boyle). His Allen is at once pathetic and tragic; a clammy, desperate, mouth-breathing emblem of American loneliness, shuffling forlornly down the hall in search of happy endings.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch*Magnolia (1999)*
Hoffman's most fruitful creative collaboration came with writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. The two worked together on Hard Eight and Boogie Nights before teaming for the third time on Magnolia, a magnificent fresco of lost souls in Los Angeles. Anderson's inhabitants are in turmoil and the skies are raining frogs. But all is not lost, because Hoffman's nurse serves as the film's moral centre. He's toiling quietly behind the scenes to make things right and provide broken humanity with a small measure of peace.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch*The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)*There is a danger that we overlook some of the truly great Hoffman performances, the ones where he is so at ease within the grain of a movie that he all but disappears. So it is with The Talented Mr Ripley, which turns the floodlights on Jude Law, Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow and allows their co-star to pootle about in the background. But we underestimate Hoffman at your peril. In this case, his grinning, ugly American may look like a buffoon. Events will prove that he's sharp, dogged and deadly; the thriller's hero in all but name.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch
*Almost Famous (2000)*Cameron Crowe's rose-tinted tour of the early 70s rock scene cast Hoffman in a pivotal role as music journalist Lester Bangs, a crumpled bastion of integrity who advises the teenaged hero to stay true to his calling, to always write the truth and to never, ever start to believe that the celebs are your friends. "We're uncool," he tells him, in a wry riff on Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel. "And while women will always be a problem for us, most of the great art in the world is about that very same problem. Good-looking people don't have any spine. Their art never lasts. They get the girls. But we're smarter."
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch
*Capote (2005)*Philip Seymour Hoffman may have been uncool (at least by the vapid standards of the Hollywood A-list). He may rarely have got the girl. But me produced great art and was eventually rewarded with the best actor Oscar for his careful, nuanced turn as Truman Capote, an exotic piece of New York wildlife, transplanted to the wide open spaces of Kansas and preparing to write his masterpiece.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch*Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)*
Sidney Lumet's superb late crime drama cast Hoffman as a white-collar calamity, who embezzles money to feed his drug habit and then hatches a plan to rob his parents' jewellery store. The film is a great, bubbling cauldron of intrigue, a tale of blood, honour and betrayal that sent the old director off with a flourish and further burnished Hoffman's credentials as the perfect embodiment of hobbled, middle-class masculinity.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch*Synecdoche, New York (2008)*
Hoffman probably never made a more bold, overreaching and possibly bonkers film than Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman's tale of a fading theatre director who sets out to create his masterpiece: a vast stage production that contains the entire world as he sees it. Kaufman's film was by turns eccentric, perplexing and heartbreakingly sad. It bombed at the box office and alienated the critics, though a few wise angels were prepared to defend its wildness of vision. The late Roger Ebert, for instance, would later hail Synecdoche as the best film of the decade.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch
*The Master*
Hoffman reunited with Paul Thomas Anderson for what may well go down as his best remembered role in The Master, a majestic epic about American dreamers and schemers in the years immediately following the second world war. Hoffman stars as Lancaster Dodd, the puckish, playful cult leader loosely based on L Ron Hubbard. Pacing the dock of his yacht, Dodd insists that by unlocking old traumas he can cure cancer and bring world peace. Joaquin Phoenix's anguished drifter is only too happy to go along for the ride.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch
*A Most Wanted Man (2014)*Philip Seymour Hoffman gave what would prove to be his last great performance in A Most Wanted Man, which premiered last month at the Sundance film festival. Anton Corbijn's adaptation of the John Le Carre thriller prowls the grungy underworld of Hamburg, spying terrorists in every corner. Hoffman stars as Gunther Bachmann of German intelligence, scotch in one hand, fag in the other, as he toils to solve the mystery bring the culprits to justice. It is a performance of terrific, lip-smacking relish: full of mischief and yet driven by integrity. We cheer for Gunther Bachmann, just as we cheer for all of Hoffman's characters (the good, the bad and the ugly) as they grope their way through a grubby world towards the final credits.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 hour ago.
Philip Seymour Hoffman has died aged 46 in New York. Peter Bradshaw's tribute to the actor is here, and Simon Hattenstone recalls interviewing him in 2011. Here's 10 of the best from a virtuosic talent.*The Big Lebowski (1998)*
Ten great performances? Philip Seymour Hoffman produced scores of them, in both lead roles and supporting turns, splurging them out like a fountainhead. No shortlist worth its salt should ignore his brilliant early appearances in Nobody's Fool, Hard Eight or Boogie Nights. But, for the sake of brevity, let's start with his brief, delicious masterclass as Brandt, the gloriously obsequious PA to a boorish billionaire, in the Coens' freewheeling 1998 classic The Big Lebowski. So what if the script gave him few lines to work with? Hoffman's embarrassed, defensive chuckle played like a comic monologue in itself.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch
*Happiness (1998)*
Todd Solondz's pitch-black comedy installed East Coast suburbia as a circle of hell and sparked outrage with its depiction of a loving American dad (Dylan Baker) who abuses his pre-teen son's best friend. Hoffman skulked in the shadows as Allen, the local sex pest, who pines for his neighbour (Lara Flynn Boyle). His Allen is at once pathetic and tragic; a clammy, desperate, mouth-breathing emblem of American loneliness, shuffling forlornly down the hall in search of happy endings.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch*Magnolia (1999)*
Hoffman's most fruitful creative collaboration came with writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. The two worked together on Hard Eight and Boogie Nights before teaming for the third time on Magnolia, a magnificent fresco of lost souls in Los Angeles. Anderson's inhabitants are in turmoil and the skies are raining frogs. But all is not lost, because Hoffman's nurse serves as the film's moral centre. He's toiling quietly behind the scenes to make things right and provide broken humanity with a small measure of peace.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch*The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)*There is a danger that we overlook some of the truly great Hoffman performances, the ones where he is so at ease within the grain of a movie that he all but disappears. So it is with The Talented Mr Ripley, which turns the floodlights on Jude Law, Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow and allows their co-star to pootle about in the background. But we underestimate Hoffman at your peril. In this case, his grinning, ugly American may look like a buffoon. Events will prove that he's sharp, dogged and deadly; the thriller's hero in all but name.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch
*Almost Famous (2000)*Cameron Crowe's rose-tinted tour of the early 70s rock scene cast Hoffman in a pivotal role as music journalist Lester Bangs, a crumpled bastion of integrity who advises the teenaged hero to stay true to his calling, to always write the truth and to never, ever start to believe that the celebs are your friends. "We're uncool," he tells him, in a wry riff on Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel. "And while women will always be a problem for us, most of the great art in the world is about that very same problem. Good-looking people don't have any spine. Their art never lasts. They get the girls. But we're smarter."
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch
*Capote (2005)*Philip Seymour Hoffman may have been uncool (at least by the vapid standards of the Hollywood A-list). He may rarely have got the girl. But me produced great art and was eventually rewarded with the best actor Oscar for his careful, nuanced turn as Truman Capote, an exotic piece of New York wildlife, transplanted to the wide open spaces of Kansas and preparing to write his masterpiece.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch*Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)*
Sidney Lumet's superb late crime drama cast Hoffman as a white-collar calamity, who embezzles money to feed his drug habit and then hatches a plan to rob his parents' jewellery store. The film is a great, bubbling cauldron of intrigue, a tale of blood, honour and betrayal that sent the old director off with a flourish and further burnished Hoffman's credentials as the perfect embodiment of hobbled, middle-class masculinity.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch*Synecdoche, New York (2008)*
Hoffman probably never made a more bold, overreaching and possibly bonkers film than Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman's tale of a fading theatre director who sets out to create his masterpiece: a vast stage production that contains the entire world as he sees it. Kaufman's film was by turns eccentric, perplexing and heartbreakingly sad. It bombed at the box office and alienated the critics, though a few wise angels were prepared to defend its wildness of vision. The late Roger Ebert, for instance, would later hail Synecdoche as the best film of the decade.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch
*The Master*
Hoffman reunited with Paul Thomas Anderson for what may well go down as his best remembered role in The Master, a majestic epic about American dreamers and schemers in the years immediately following the second world war. Hoffman stars as Lancaster Dodd, the puckish, playful cult leader loosely based on L Ron Hubbard. Pacing the dock of his yacht, Dodd insists that by unlocking old traumas he can cure cancer and bring world peace. Joaquin Phoenix's anguished drifter is only too happy to go along for the ride.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch
*A Most Wanted Man (2014)*Philip Seymour Hoffman gave what would prove to be his last great performance in A Most Wanted Man, which premiered last month at the Sundance film festival. Anton Corbijn's adaptation of the John Le Carre thriller prowls the grungy underworld of Hamburg, spying terrorists in every corner. Hoffman stars as Gunther Bachmann of German intelligence, scotch in one hand, fag in the other, as he toils to solve the mystery bring the culprits to justice. It is a performance of terrific, lip-smacking relish: full of mischief and yet driven by integrity. We cheer for Gunther Bachmann, just as we cheer for all of Hoffman's characters (the good, the bad and the ugly) as they grope their way through a grubby world towards the final credits.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 hour ago.