Died yesterday (Sunday) in his New York apartment.
His acting legacy is best summed by New York Times critic A.O. Scott:
He did not care if we liked any of
these sad specimens. The point was to make us believe them and to recognize in
them — in him — a truth about ourselves that we might otherwise have preferred
to avoid. He had a rare ability to illuminate the varieties of human ugliness.
No one ever did it so beautifully.
Mr. Seymour Hoffman directed and acted (one of life's less sad specimens-"the sort of people who wouldn’t even make it onto a television makeover show") in the beautiful movie of Robert Glaudini's play Jack Goes Boating. New York is really quite a small place. Yet to many at times of sadness it's often so very hard to even see the horizon.
The Daily Show's tribute
The Daily Show's tribute
[A postscript that Mr Seymour Hoffman would hopefully
approved of.:
It is very easy to judge people for their failures- in this
case drug addiction (the lack of judgement precisely what made
Hoffman’s characters unforgettable). The Panic in Needle Park is not a film
about drugs. It is a film about being human. Of New York. Of belonging, loving, forgetting,
trying to remember: when the truth will always lie within oneself.
The UK Second Sight DVD is better than the Fox US 2007
version.]
And
people will say
In
far away blue days
It
will become clear
What
is false and what is true
What
is false will perish
Although
it rules today
What
is true shall come –
Although
it dies today
Playwright Ödön von Horváth died in Paris on the evening of
June 1, 1938, when a tree limb broke
off during a thunderstorm, hitting
him on the head and killing him
instantly. One of the items found
in his pocket was a cigarette pack with this poem written on it. He'd just been to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in a cinema on the Champs Elysées. No joke.---Judgement Day
(Translated by Ian Huish)
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