Biography of Philip Seymour Hoffman :- After almost twenty years of film and theater career playing characters of great psychological complexity, often secondary, gained fame and popularity from the Academy Award for best actor who deserved his performance in the movie Capote (2005), based on the life of American writer.
Biography of Philip Seymour Hoffman
- Born:- 23 July 1967, Fairport, New York, United States
- Died:- 2 February 2014, West Village, New York City, New York, United States
- Awards:- Academy Award for Best Actor,
- Children:- Tallulah Hoffman, Cooper Alexander Hoffman, Willa Hoffman
- Cause Of Death:- Combined drug
Philip Seymour Hoffman was the third of four children of a Xerox executive and a fighter housewife who acquired a marked feminist conscience when, following the breakup of her marriage, she was forced to move forward with her four children alone.
See Also: Biography of Daniel Day-Lewis
Already from school, her competitive mother, lawyer at the time, encouraged her to realize her vocation as an actor.
At twenty-two, according to his own confession, he began “to fear seriously” for his life and decided to put an end to his nocturnal wanderings and his addiction to alcohol.
Until that moment he had been a young man like the others, who alternated his participation in modest productions with his work of waiter (which he always hated) and with a curious hobby of wrestling (which he abandoned with an injury).
After graduating in theater in 1989 by the Tisch School of Drama of New York, Philip Hoffman added to his name the one of his grandfathers, Seymour, and began to frequent the scenes and to appear in secondary papers in independent films as in Hollywood productions .
The law and order teleserie was his baptism, and when he participated in the first film of renown in 1992, Esencia de mujer , next to Al Pacino, was the fifth time that entered the recording studios.
Although his role was far from being relevant, he always ensured that his experience in this film determined the rest of his professional career.
The truth is that Hoffman always chose carefully his characters, relegating to the background the economic benefit that could be reported.
That same year he set up the independent theater company LAByrinth Theater, which would remain professionally active for a long time, releasing at least one work a year. Also at that time he began to teach at the Columbia University School of Arts.
Ten films like Twister or When a man loves a woman they mediate between Essence of woman and the work that, a lustrum later, it turned him into one of the habitual faces of the independent cinema.
It was the choral film Boogie Nights (1997), in which, giving birth to a gay porn star operator in love with a star of the genre, played by Mark Wahlberg, completed a luxury cast that included both veterans of the scene Burt Reynolds) as well as young promises (Heather Graham, Julianne Moore or Wahlberg himself).
From that moment he became one of the unconditional actors of its director, Paul Thomas Anderson, who always provided him with heavyweight papers, even if they were secondary.
Secondary with Character
Hoffman immediately revealed himself as a professional of great character, highly sacrificed and committed to his work.
This comment in an interview is revealing of the way he understood his profession: “Once, while we were filming, someone asked me if I was having fun. Of course I do not have fun at all! When I’m done, what amuses me is to see that I’ve done a fucking good job, that’s bringing something to someone. That’s when I find tons of fun, but not before. ”
With that mentality, it is not surprising that in just one year his presence shone as fleetingly as intensely in films such as Todd Solonz’s Hapiness (1998), The Coen Brothers, or Magnolia (1999) , By Paul Thomas Anderson.
The roles, disparate but always extreme: in Magnolia he gave life to a self-sacrificing nurse who tried to find the son of the dying person he had under his care.
In Hapiness , a lonely degenerate who harasses his neighbor with obscene calls; In The Great Lebowski , to the absent-minded mediator of a millionaire whose daughter has been kidnapped.
In 1999, his appearance in Anthony Minghella’s ” Mr. Ripley’s Talent” steals a starring trio: Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. Little by little, Hoffman gained experience as a multidisciplinary and chameleon actor, deep knower of all genres, from the raw drama to the most acidic comedy, without theater. And, in parallel, he managed to win two Tony nominations for best stage actor in works such as Peter Sellars’ The Merchant of Venice .
Beginning the new millennium, moviegoers became accustomed to seeing him in productions of the most varied fur, always as secondary and effective secondary: from State and Main (2000) by David Mamet, to The Red Dragon (2002), third installment of the saga of Hannibal Lecter, to the comedy Punch-Drunk Love (2002), again under the orders of Paul T. Anderson, or Cold Mountain (2003) , directed by Anthony Minghella, among many others.
But it seemed difficult to imagine him in a leading role. Until one day his agent communicated to him a radically different task (as far as protagonism is concerned) of everything he had accepted until then.
It was two of his teenage friends, Bennet Miller and Dan Futterman, who provided Hoffman with his first major lead role in proposing to play nothing less than the writer Truman Capote.
The perfectionist Hoffman accepted, even knowing that there was a huge handicap, since the actor’s physique and that of the author of Chameleon Music had nothing to do with it.
Hoffman’s immersion work (not to be termed otherwise) in Capote’s personality was a striking professionalism.
In addition to the documentary of the brothers Albert and David Maysles With love from Truman , that was extremely useful to him to capture the gestural idiosincrasia of the writer, the actor appealed to the most diverse sources.
“I have tried to make all types of papers, which keep me working and interested,” he said. “The characters, like Capote, who really live out of one’s experience and everyday existence are much more pleasing and satisfying.” Bennett Miller’s film covered the six years during which the extravagant novelist wrote his masterpiece, A Cold Blood , published in 1966, when he was investigating the psychology of two people sentenced to death for murdering a family.
The corpulent actor was forced to lose 18 kilos to look slightly to his character. Realizing that his goal should not be imitation (which would have been implausible in two people with a different physique and tone of voice), he tried to surround himself with people who had treated the writer closely.
Probably who more data could contribute to his vision of the personage was the famous photographer Richard Avedon, intimate friend of Capote. Before his death in 2004, Avedon had time to show Hoffman hundreds of photographs of the man he was to play on the screen.
The result of such exhaustive work was a real rain of awards (Boston, BAFTA, Chicago …) that culminated in the Oscar for best lead actor. It was recognition for a superb career, in which the secondary characters were always the tonic. Secondaries in minutaje, since for Hoffman they have the same importance that the main ones.
At the time of receiving his Oscar, Philip had emotional words of remembrance for his mother, from whom he inherited that fighting spirit that finally got reward.
After the Oscar, things changed for Hoffman, who became a quoted actor who rained millionaire propositions of the great producers of the cinema of sort.
Some might think that at the age of thirty-nine he enjoyed a belated recognition, but the truth is that actors like Henry Fonda only won an Oscar posthumously.
At the moment, ending his participation in Mission Impossible III (doing “bad”), his new projects included working with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts in Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) by Mike Nichols, in a role of adviser to a Congressman who would be worth an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
Hoffman was put to the orders of the prestigious Sidney Lumet for another film well received by the critic, Before the devil knows that you have died (2007), and a year later confirmed his condition of perfect secundary with the second Oscar nomination in such Category by The Doubt (2008), in which he masterfully incarnated a priest accused of pedophilia.
His career continued at a good pace, with one or two shootings a year and outstanding titles: Incredible but false (2009), The Ides of March (2011), Moneyball: Breaking the Rules (2011), The Master (2012) … Nothing made her think that The Last Concert (2013) was going to be her last film.
Had returned to his former addiction to drugs, And in May 2013 underwent a detoxification cure. Eight months later he was found dead in his apartment, victim of an overdose.
