Philip Seymour Hoffman-actor (July 23, 1967 – February 2, 2014)

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

[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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