At the beginning of this month, Philip Seymour Hoffman had two films in the can — Anton Corbijn's thriller A Man Wanted and the crime drama God's Pocket — and plans to appear in the next two Hunger Games films. He was preparing to star in a Showtime series, Happyish, and to direct Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal in Ezekiel Moss. He was primed to launch into the next phase of his already-brilliant career. "He wanted to be done with playing the sad-sack loser, the guy who's jerking off," his close friend, the playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, says.
But all those plans went to dust on Sunday, February 2nd. That morning, Mimi O'Donnell, Hoffman's longtime partner and mother of their three children, texted David Bar Katz, another one of Hoffman's playwright friends, because the actor hadn't shown up to pick up their kids. Katz went to Hoffman's temporary apartment, where he'd been living for a few months after falling off the wagon, two blocks away from his family's home. That's where he found a generation's most brilliant actor — dead in the bathroom, a needle in his left arm.
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