When he directed Philip Seymour Hoffman in the Tony-winning revival of “A Death of a Salesman,” Mike Nichols told me in an interview that the actor had been the linchpin for the production.
“Phil is a monster onstage,” said Nichols, who’d earlier directed Hoffman in the Public Theater’s production of “The Seagull.” “He can do anything any time. He’s there for everything you’ve thought of and even better at everything you haven’t thought of. Like Meryl [Streep], he’s a practical actor. He listens and in the listening makes things happen. With great actors, it’s about exploring, exploring, exploring.”
We often forget that those explorations can come at great personal cost. Living so close to the skin took its toll on the man known as “the actor’s actor.” Hoffman was found dead, at 46, from a heroin overdose on Sunday, February 1. The outpouring of shock and grief from the both the theater and film communities was a measure of just how admired he was. A statement from Nichols, who’d also directed him in the film “Charlie Wilson’s War,” read: “No words for this. He was too great and we’re too shattered.”
Hoffman had film success — an Oscar win for his uncanny performance as Truman Capote in the film “Capote,” and three more nominations for “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Doubt,” and “The Master.” But his heart was in the theater and he periodically returned to it. Not just for Tony-nominated turns in the Broadway revivals of “True West,” “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” and “Death of a Salesman,” but also with his work with the Labyrinth Theater, the adventurous off-Broadway company that he co-founded and where he served as actor, director, and artistic director. (Mimi O’Donnell, his long-time companion and the mother of his three children who survive him, is the current artistic director.)
The name of the theater was well-founded. Its mission is to serve as a crucible where artists could experiment with passionate intensity new works by the likes of such playwrights as David Bar Katz, Stephen Adly Guirgis (“Motherfucker With a Hat”), Stephen Belber, and Bob Glaudini, whose “A Family for All Occasions” Hoffman directed there just last May. At the Labyrinth, Hoffman could freely cultivate his penchant for pathetic losers, misfits, miscreants, and villains far from the glare of Broadway and Hollywood, for which he was so ill-suited. He fearlessly explored those lost souls, whom he loved dearly, with such conviction that it was hard for him to leave them at the stage door. Long after the curtain came down, he still found himself in the maze, confused, lost, and in pain.
But there were joys in the process as well.
Nichols recalled that after a hard day of rehearsals on “Death of a Salesman,” when the company was in the middle of that uncertain phase when there’s much flailing and gnashing of teeth, Hoffman told them a story about when he and John C. Reilly were preparing to open on Broadway in Sam Shepard’s “True West.” Both of the actors, playing feuding brothers, were panic-stricken during the five-week rehearsal period, especially since they’d be called to alternate in the roles in the course of the run. Shepard would occasionally visit rehearsals and promptly fall asleep in the front row. The director, Matthew Warchus, rarely said much to either of them except for the occasional, “You’ll be alright, man.” Finally, in the last three days of rehearsals, they were able to grasp a hold of the two characters. Hoffman breathed a huge sigh of relief and confronted Warchus. “Why didn’t you ever tell us anything?” he asked. To which the director replied, “Well that’s no fun. The fun is figuring it out for yourself.”
Nichols said that when he watched Hoffman work, he felt something that he felt with very few other actors. “He’s such a great actor, so incredibly versatile, that it’s scary. He’s a terrifyingly good actor. ”
