Philip Seymour Hoffman: as intense in the flesh as on screen

Of course, he was anything but optimistic in the flesh. It was painful for him to sit down and talk when all he wanted to do was get away and smoke in silence. He spoke in the same fractured, tortured sentences as he did in his films. Nobody did crippled communication quite like Hoffman. Hoffman was a lumbering, grumbling bear of a man.He didn't say a word more than necessary and often said less. But there was a profound honesty to him. He might have insisted he was giving me nothing of himself, but when I transcribed our meeting I realised it was just like one of his movies – he'd reluctantly grouched his way to a full and complex self-portrait.Hoffman had been addicted to drink and drugs as a young man, but had been clean for more than 20 years. He never lost the sense that he might lapse, though. "Just because all that time's passed doesn't mean 'maybe it was just a phase'", he told me. "That's you know, that's who I am." A year later, in 2012, he checked himself into rehab for taking prescription drugs and snorting cocaine.When we met, I told him nobody did self-loathing quite like him. He took it as a compliment. "Well, I think everyone struggles with self-love," he said. "That's pretty much the human condition, you know, waking up and trying to live your day in a way that you can go to sleep and feel OK about yourself."It turned out that this was a stable part of his life. His three children had given him a sense of purpose, and he said he was teaching himself not to drive himself to punishing extremes. He insisted he was becoming a pragmatist – if his current project wasn't the greatest, there would always be the next one. "I got to remember to not kill myself, not beat myself up, not get too worked up about it. There will be another film, there will be another relationship, or I'll die and then I'll be dead."Hoffman said he was was glad that the desperate intensity of youth, when everything was all or nothing, had passed. But perhaps it never did.(theguardian.com)ANN.Az