Part of Gone Too Soon featuring Heath Ledger, Chadwick Boseman, River Phoenix, Paul Walker, and James Dean.
Rise to Fame
Scotty J, the lovesick boom operator in Boogie Nights, was the kind of character that could've been played as a joke. Hoffman played him as barely-contained desperation, and after 1997 it was impossible to look at him the same way. He'd already been doing New York theater for years and taking thankless roles in films like Scent of a Woman, but Boogie Nights made the industry sit up. By the time he won the Oscar for Capote in 2006, after four months of preparing Truman Capote's voice alone, it felt less like a breakthrough and more like an overdue receipt for a decade of work nobody else would've done.
In the Spotlight
The consensus that formed around Hoffman after his death has only hardened. He had four Oscar nominations in seven years, won once for Capote, and was regularly described as the best actor alive in a critical press that rarely agrees on anything. What complicates that legacy is what didn't happen: the planned directorial debut Ezekiel Moss with Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal died with him, along with a career trajectory that hadn't peaked. His son Cooper starred in Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza in 2021. That connection to Anderson's world, where the father made his reputation, has a strange elegance to it.
Side Notes
He beat Heath Ledger for Best Actor at the 2006 Oscars, then lost Best Supporting Actor to Ledger posthumously three years later for The Dark Knight. That coincidence is a little too on the nose. He was sober for 22 years before relapsing in 2012, having gotten clean at 22 after saying he was 'panicked for my life.' Off-screen, he was co-creative director of LAByrinth Theater, New York's premier off-Broadway company, and had spent decades building a parallel career on stage that most film actors don't bother with. He was preparing to direct, not just act, when he died.
Final Chapter
His funeral Mass at St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan drew Cate Blanchett, Amy Adams, and Julianne Moore. Broadway dimmed its lights. Four people were arrested in the days following his death on drug charges; Robert Vineberg, a musician whose phone contained Hoffman's number, was charged with felony drug possession. A Most Wanted Man opened that July, the last film he completed, to critical praise. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, released that November, was dedicated to him.