Philip Seymour Hoffman once named his cinematic crush
One of the modern era’s greatest actors, there are few names to have proven themselves so reliable so often as Philip Seymour Hoffman, who always gave a great performance regardless of how big or small his role was, never mind the genre it occupied.
Whether it was a scene-stealing supporting part in effects-heavy blockbuster Twister, his five collaborations with Paul Thomas Anderson between Hard Eight and The Master, delivering the best villain in the Mission: Impossible franchise’s history, or his turns in titles as diverse as The Big Lebowski, Almost Famous, Synecdoche, New York, and The Hunger Games series, Hoffman was a guarantee of quality.
Recognition for his talents began to grow as his profile rose, culminating in an Academy Award win for ‘Best Actor’ the very first time he was nominated after leading Capote, before he gathered another three nominations in the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ category between 2008 and 2013, with the latter ceremony unfolding just 20 days after his death at the age of only 46 on February 2nd, 2014.
A quiet and private person away from the screen who rarely gave an insight into their private life, Hoffman had discussed his substance abuse issues at various points throughout his career as a public figure, but having maintained his sobriety for years, a relapse in 2012 would end up shocking the industry to its core when his passing was announced.
On one of the rare occasions when Hoffman was pressed on his formative years, though, he ended up naming somebody he would end up co-starring with as his ultimate cinematic crush. “Debra Winger”, he told Entertainment Weekly in no uncertain terms. “I was 13 years old and I cried for a week after Terms of Endearment. I’m not even kidding”.
As fate would have it, his fourth-ever film credit – and the final one before he changed his billed name from Phil Hoffman to its full nomenclature – came in 1992’s dramatic comedy Leap of Faith. Who played the female lead in director Richard Pearce’s movie opposite Steve Martin? Why, it was Winger, of course.
Harking back to the way Terms of Endearment left him as an emotional wreck, Hoffman even admitted to W Magazine that he told Winger precisely how he felt when they met as colleagues. “I thought she’d never see me again, it was this weird thing. I just fell for her big time, you know,” he explained. “I think I told her that. I think she knows.”
It’s not every day that an actor gets the opportunity to be in the same feature they grew up crushing on, but it wasn’t even that long into Hoffman’s career that he came face-to-face with the person who gained his affection and left him in floods of tears.
