Cate Blanchett read from the bible, struggling against tears. Michelle Williams wiped her eyes in grief outside the church. And three young children cried for their father.
Five days after an apparent heroin overdose in his Greenwich Village apartment, actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was bid farewell Friday at a private, celebrity-studded funeral on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Some 300 mourners — enough star presence to fill a shelf with Academy Awards — gathered at noon at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, holding programs that read, “A Celebration of Life.”
“Like a collapsed star, a teaspoon of you weighed a thousand tons,” playwright David Bar Katz wrote in a poignant memorial essay for the program’s back page.
“I won’t ever memorialize you, you beautiful beautiful beast because even in your absence you’re so much more here than I am,” wrote Katz, the close friend who discovered Hoffman body Sunday in the actor’s Bethune Street apartment, surrounded by spent bags of heroin, a syringe still in his left forearm.
“Oh, Phil,” the shattered pal wrote. “For the rest of my life I’m going to be looking towards the door waiting for you to walk in.”
Tears and smiles mingled under the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the 1898 church, attendees said.
“We all laughed. We all had a good laugh a few times. It was very respectful and loving and simple,” Oscar-nominated playwright and screenwriter Jose Rivera told reporters afterward.
Hoffman “was quoted extensively, and you could hear his voice in the room,” added Rivera.
At one point, the officiating priest, the Rev. James Martin — a Jesuit priest who had helped Hoffman prepare for his Oscar-nominated performance in the film, “Doubt,” — brought the attendees to laughter by recalling the late actor telling him, “Father, when I was a kid, I had to go to mass all the time. Brutal. Very, very brutal.”
At another point, acclaimed filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson in a moving eulogy remembered Hoffman’s lasting love for his partner of 15 years, costume designer and theater director Mimi O’Donnell.
“Man, she’s got the greatest body,” Anderson quoted Hoffman enthusing. As funeral-goers laughed gently, the quote was continued: “The greatest body. The greatest body.”
Among the black-clad luminaries were Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Diane Keaton, Vanessa Redgrave, Ethan Hawke, Jake Gyllenhall, Spike Lee, Louis C.K., Joaquin Phoenix, Brian Dennehy, Bobby Canavale, Eric Bogosian, Julianne Moore, director Joel Coen, John C. Reilly, Josh Hamilton, Justin Theroux, John Slattery, Anna Paquin, Marisa Tomei, Mary-Louise Parker, Maya Rudolph, Laura Linney, Ashley Olsen, Ellen Burstyn, Diane Sawyer and director husband Mike Nichols.
Many were visibly shaken as the church choir and organ rendered a mournful recessional hymn, “Amazing Grace,” and they left the 90 minute ceremony.
But most raw in their grief were O’Donnell and the couple’s three grade-school children.
As the burly, brilliant actor’s cherry wood coffin was shouldered down the church’s limestone steps and lifted into a black Cadillac hearse, Tallulah, 7, turned to her mother in evident grief, and embraced her.
View videoO’Donnell kept an arm around both her girls — the youngest, Willa, 5, especially, clung to her mother — as the couple’s eldest child, Cooper, 10, stood at their side, his hands clasped and held to his face.
“The family is doing awful. Awful,” said one funeral goer who asked not to be named.
“You think of the family, the children,” said another attendee, actor and University of Buffalo acting professor Stephen Henderson, 64.
“He left plenty of art. It would’ve been great to have more, but check out everything he left. That will fill you up. His name wasn’t Phil for nothing. He would fill you up.”
Of the funeral, Henderson added, “It was from the heart. Everything was from the heart.”
Hoffman, 46, was found dead Sunday in the bathroom of his Greenwich Village apartment, a syringe still in his arm and some 70 small bags of heroin, 20 of them empty, in the apartment.
The star of Hollywood and Broadway was widely regarded as among the best and most hard-working of his generation, described as fearless in his command of ambitious and versatile roles.
He was nominated for a Tony for his portrayal two years ago of Willy Loman, the title character of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”
He won the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Truman Capote in the 2005 film “Capote,” and was nominated for Oscars for his leading roles in the films “Doubt,” (2008), “Charlie Wilson’s War,” (2007), and “The Master,” (2013).
Hoffman was vocal about his long struggle against drug and alcohol addiction.
He had told interviewers that he had gone to rehab in his early 20s, and stayed clean for more than two decades, all the while attending meetings for struggling addicts and alcoholics in Greenwich Village.
But he had fallen off the wagon in recent years — posing with drinks in hand for cameras at awards and functions, and confessing to pals last year that a dependence on prescription drugs had escalated again to heroin use.
Friends said he put himself in rehab for ten days in May. Later last year, O’Donnell asked him to leave the family’s Jane Street apartment, and he moved into a $10,000-a-month rental on Bethune Street.
Law enforcement sources have told The Post that Hoffman purchased his fatal stash of heroin at around 8 p.m. on the night before he died.
Two dealers, both wearing messenger bags, stood beside the actor as he withdrew $1,200 in six installments from an ATM outside a D’Agostino’s near his apartment.
The pair are being sought; police have already busted a trio of alleged dealers from a Mott Street apartment after an informant told investigators of seeing Hoffman scoring there months ago.
