Philip Seymour Hoffman, forty six, was found dead in his fourth floor West Village apartment in Manhattan on February 02, 2014.

As an actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman was an analyst of human frailty, but in person he was stodgy, almost bear-like, with a shaggy beard that came and went, as the roles required it, and the ambling physicality of a man who, you were sure, was here for the long haul.

He had been a professional actor for twenty three years, exactly half of his life, just long enough, in the end, for him to leave us with two of the greatest performances in the history of cinema.

The first performance came in the year 2008, in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, in which he played Caden Cotard, a theatre director who was given a grant to pursue a wildly ambitious work and the second came in 2012, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Here he essayed the role of Lancaster Dodd, a loose and rangy riff on the Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard.

While there was no official cause of death offered by the police, or the city’s coroner’s office, several media outlets cited anonymous sources saying he had been found on the floor of his bathroom by a visiting screenwriter shortly before noon with a needle sticking out of his arm, suggesting a possible drug overdose. He had admitted to seeking treatment for heroin abuse in the past.

Police later confirmed in a statement that Hoffman was found unresponsive on the bathroom floor of his Greenwich Village apartment after officers responded to a 911 call.

Hoffman was a favourite among audiences worldwide for his work in films beginning with his breakout role in the 1997 film Boogie Nights. He won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as the writer Truman Capote in the year 2005 for Capote. Through his career he was also nominated for a Best Supporting Actor thrice.

Hoffman was also a strong force in the New York theatre scene, starring in a 2012 Broadway Production of Death Of A Salesman and directing others including, In Arabia We’d All be Kings in 1999. He was also a regular presence in theatre stalls around the city as he took in the works of his fellow directors and actors.

Hoffman was in a relationship with costume designer Mimi O’Donnell for the last fifteen years of his life. They met while working on the 1999 play In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, which Hoffman directed. They have a son, Cooper, born in 2003 and two daughters, Tallulah, born in 2006 and Willa, 2008.