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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Phillip Seymour Hoffman, photographed for the December 2005 issue of GQ.Photo: Peggy Sirota\n\nIt's hard to remember now, but right up to the day he died, nobody\u2014him included\u2014thought of Philip Seymour Hoffman as a screen icon. The dude was a working actor. One with a heckuva reputation, sure\u2014but nonetheless, a guy who turned up in three or so movies a year. That's the amount of time Daniel Day-Lewis usually needs to mull over doing just one.\n\nEven though some of those movies were pretty negligible, one reason Hoffman had such a heckuva reputation was that he never gave any role\u2014deep or shallow, well-written or clunky\u2014anything less than his best. So it's paradoxically fitting that A Most Wanted Man, his final starring role on-screen, is a fairly wan thriller that showcases him adding every touch of inner life he can to the kind of part Robert De Niro has been phoning in for decades.\n\nFor starters, he gets interested in how to be German. He's playing G\u00FCnther Bachmann, the seen-it-all head of an anti-terrorist unit tracking Islamist radicals in Hamburg, and he doesn't overdo the foreignness. But details like the\n\nAchieving that kind of believability was always his goal, and it's very different from the ostentation of actors who hurl themselves into a part so hard that the screenplay never stops shuddering. As good as Christian Bale can be, you rarely believe his characters have known plenty of drab, unremarkable days when they didn't get even one chance to be intense. Hoffman excelled at suggesting such prosaic stuff. In A Most Wanted Man, with virtually no help from the script, his attitude and manner conjure up a backstory packed with professional and personal frustrations, along with the occasional coup.\n\nHe also looks like a wreck. Given what we now know, that's painful to see. But his blobby, red-eyed dishevelment suits the character so well that you soon forget you're gazing at an actor who'll be dead within months; you're just watching the performance. This one won't be remembered the way Hoffman's jaunty self-help guru in The Master will be\u2014or his soul-curdled theater director in Synecdoche, New York, or his gay boom operator in Boogie Nights, or his arrogant rich boy in The Talented Mr. Ripley, or his masturbating perv in Happiness. But his work in A Most Wanted Man is still pure Hoffman, and that's never nothing.\n\nIn more than one sense, he was the most democratic of screen (and stage) performers. First off, forget funny accents: Actors who can impersonate people from almost any economic background are rarer than you'd think. (De Niro can play poor or nouveau riche, but he can't play old money.) But Hoffman also never condescended to any of his characters, right down to Ben Stiller's pants-crapping pal in Along Came Polly. He never condescended to what kind of movie he was in, either, even when cast as the villain in Mission: Impossible III.\n\nMy hunch is that he thrived on variety because he wanted to know how everything\u2014and everyone\u2014worked, himself included. And it's too bad he got nearly all of it right except the last part."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/philip-seymour-hoffman-farewell>