Best Known As: Oscar-winning star of the 2005 movie Capote
Stage and screen actor Philip Seymour Hoffman won critical raves and an Oscar as best actor for his starring role in the 2005 movie Capote. Hoffman earned a reputation early in his career as a hard-working actor's actor, in supporting roles in films like The Getaway (1994) and Twister (1996). His stock shot up after appearing in the Paul Thomas Anderson dramas Boogie Nights (1997, starring Mark Wahlberg) and Magnolia (1999, with Tom Cruise), and he became a regular player in high-profile movies, including The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999, starring Matt Damon) and Almost Famous (2000, as the music critic Lester Bangs). He also proved his comic abilities in the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski (1998, with Julianne Moore) and Along Came Polly (2004, with Ben Stiller). Hoffman has a successful stage career too, with two Tony nominations for Best Actor to his credit, for True West (2000) and Long Day's Journey Into Night (2003). He agreed to play writer Truman Capote for a childhood friend, writer/director Bennett Miller, and helped support the production of Capote. The role won him many prizes, including both a Golden Globe and the Oscar. His other films include Red Dragon (2002, starring Ralph Fiennes), Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007, with Ethan Hawke), Charlie Wilson's War (2007, starring Tom Hanks) and Doubt (2008, with Meryl Streep and Viola Davis). Hoffman was nominated for Oscars for his supporting roles in Charlie Wilson's War and Doubt.
Career Highlights: Boogie Nights, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Big Lebowski
First Major Screen Credit: Scent of a Woman (1992)
Biography
One of the most original, versatile, and steadily employed actors in Hollywood, Philip Seymour Hoffman has made a name for himself playing some of the most dysfunctional characters in movie history. Although he had been acting for years, most audiences were first introduced to the actor in the award-winning Boogie Nights, where he played a nebbishy soundman with a jones for Mark Wahlberg's Dirk Diggler. Imbuing his character with both humor and poignant complexity, Hoffman was one of the more memorable aspects of an unforgettable film.
Born in Fairport, NY, in 1968, Hoffman trained at New York's Tisch School of Drama. Before breaking into film, he did a host of theater work, performing in New York, Chicago, and on a European tour. He made his film debut in the 1992 film Scent of a Woman, a critically acclaimed picture starring Al Pacino and Chris O'Donnell. Roles in a number of films of varying quality followed, including My New Gun (1992) and When a Man Loves a Woman (1994). The actor then nabbed a sizable role in Jan de Bont's 1996 tornado thriller Twister and the same year began an ongoing working relationship with Paul Thomas Anderson by appearing in his directorial debut Hard Eight. The crime drama, which also starred Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson, received positive critical attention, although it didn't create more than a minor blip at the box office. However, Hoffman's next feature and second collaboration with Anderson, Boogie Nights (1997), was both a critical and financial success, scoring a host of Academy Award nominations and simultaneously reviving the careers of some of its stars, such as Burt Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg, while providing a breakthrough for others, such as Heather Graham and Hoffman himself. He next appeared in the Robin Williams comedy Patch Adams (1998), and the same year starred in two critically acclaimed independent films, Todd Solondz's Happiness and Brad Anderson's Next Stop Wonderland. The prolific actor added an appearance in The Big Lebowski (also 1998) to his already impressive resumé. In addition to his burgeoning acting career, Hoffman won favorable notices for his directing debut with the off-Broadway In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings. Hoffman came into his own with three notable performances in 1999. He reunited with Paul Thomas Anderson to play empathic hospice nurse Phil Parma, one of the emotional anchors in Magnolia. His portrayal of upper-crust snob Freddie Miles in The Talented Mr. Ripley earned him strong notices from many critics. Hoffman's peers awarded him with a Screen Actors Guild nomination for his role as a cross dresser in Flawless opposite Robert De Niro. He returned to the Broadway stage with fellow Anderson regular John C. Reilly to play very different brothers in Sam Shepard's True West. They took a risk by switching the lead roles every three days. Their hard work earned critical raves, and each was nominated for a Tony award. In 2000, Cameron Crowe cast Hoffman as Crowe's childhood hero Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, and David Mamet tapped him to be part of the impressive ensemble in State and Main.
Hoffman maintained his status as one of the most respected and hardest-working actors in the new decade by delivering an excellent supporting turn in Red Dragon as an unctuous tabloid reporter. That same year he co-starred in Spike Lee's 25th Hour, and played the bad guy for old collaborator Paul Thomas Anderson in the offbeat romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love. 2002 also saw the release of Love Liza, a very low-budget film scripted by Hoffman's brother and directed by actor Todd Louiso that starred Phil as a grieving husband addicted to huffing gas fumes. The next year found Hoffman starring as a gambling addict in the small scale Canadian drama Owning Mahowny, and turning in a memorable supporting performance as an amoral preacher in the big screen adaptation of Cold Mountain. Hoffman was in theaters again at the beginning of 2004 as the best friend in the Ben Stiller comedy Along Came Polly. He was also part of yet another outstanding ensemble in the small screen adaptation of Richard Russo's Pulitzer prize-winning novel Empire Falls.
In 2005, Hoffman took the role of a lifetime when he assumed the title role in Bennett Miller's Capote. The film had critics in agreement that Hoffman's portrayal of complex and idiosyncratic real-life author Truman Capote was the stuff of Hollywood legend. Hoffman not only mastered the character's distinct body-language and speech but also hauntingly interpreted the subtle psychological and emotional self that made the character whole-leading many to declare that he very nearly made the film everything it was. The performance earned him the Oscar for Best Actor, as well as a Golden Globe and countless other accolades. The attention also provided a boost in profile for the actor who had for so long proved his worth in the background.
After playing the bad guy in the third Mission Impossible movie opposite Tom Cruise, Hoffman had a remarkable 2007, a year that saw him play a central part in three well-regarded films. His conniving brother in Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead was a model of self-loathing fermenting into fatal action. In addition to a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor, his highly-educated, emotionally fractured brother to Laura Linney's neurotic sister in The Savages offered him the chance to play numerous subtle and sharply observed scenes with her, the first meeting of these two revered performers. But it was his turn as the intense CIA operative in Charlie Wilson's War that won Hoffman the most widespread praise including Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor.
Hoffman continued to solidify his status as one of his generation's finest actors in 2008 with two very different roles. By choosing to play the lead in Charlie Kaufmann's directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, Hoffman again displayed his fearlessness, as well as his desire to work with the very best writers and directors he can find. That willfully difficult film never connected with mainstream audiences, but that was not true at all for Hoffman's other picture of 2008, Doubt. John Patrick Shanley's cinematic adaptation of his own award-winning play earned acting nominations for Hoffman and his three costars (Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis) from both the Screen Actors Guild, and the Academy. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
Philip Seymour Hoffman (born July 23, 1967) is an American stage and filmactor and director.
Hoffman began his professional acting career in television in 1991, and the following year began appearing in films. His work in a diverse range of supporting films roles brought him recognition over the following decade, and he achieved success in theatre. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his performances in True West (2000) and Long Day's Journey into Night (2003).
Hoffman was born in Rochester, New York, the son of Marilyn L. O'Connor, a family courtjudge, lawyer and civil rights activist, and Gordon S. Hoffman, a former Xerox executive.[1] He has two sisters, Jill and Emily, and a brother, Gordy Hoffman, who scripted the 2002 film Love Liza, in which Philip starred. His father was a Protestant of German ancestry and his mother was of Irish Catholic background, and Hoffman was not raised with a deep commitment to either religious tradition.[2][3][4] Hoffman's parents divorced when he was nine years old.[5] His first acting role was as Radar O'Reilly in Fairport High School's production of M*A*S*H in 1982.
He was college roommates at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts with actor Steven Schub (lead singer of ska band The Fenwicks) and Jimmie Corrieri (guitarist of The Fenwicks).[6] Soon after graduating, he went to rehab for drug and alcohol addiction and has since remained sober.[7]
Hoffman's first role was as a defendant in a 1991 episode of the television series Law & Order. He made his film breakthrough in 1992 when he appeared in four feature films, with the most successful film being Scent of a Woman, in which he played a rather unscrupulous classmate of Chris O'Donnell's character. He had been stocking shelves at a city grocery store at the time before landing the role and credits the film to kickstarting his career.
He appeared in Last Party 2000, a documentary about the 2000 U.S. elections. Throughout his career he has rarely been given a chance to play the lead role. In 2002, however, Hoffman starred as a widower coping with his wife's suicide in Love Liza, for which his brother, Gordy Hoffman, wrote the screenplay. In 2003, he played the lead role in Owning Mahowny as a bank employee who embezzles money to feed his gambling addiction.
He received his first Emmy Award nomination for the HBO miniseries Empire Falls, but lost to castmate and personal idol Paul Newman. One of Hoffman's earliest roles was as a police deputy who gets punched in the face by Newman in 1994's Nobody's Fool.
He made his directorial debut in 2007 for the Sydney Theatre Company when he directed Hugo Weaving in Andrew Upton's Riflemind.
Personal life
Hoffman is in a relationship with costume designer Mimi O'Donnell. They met while working on the 1999 play In Arabia We'd All Be Kings, which Hoffman directed. They have a son, Cooper Alexander, born in March 2003, and a daughter, Tallulah, born in November 2006.[8] In late October 2008, they had a second daughter, Willa.[9]
I think I'm like any actor; most actors, it's kind of inbred in you that you're never going to work again even if you are working a lot.
- Philip Seymour Hoffman
I think I'm like any actor; most actors, it's kind of inbred in you that you're never going to work again even if you are working a lot.
