Chubby 12-year-old Phil Hoffman’s rise to Oscar-winning acclaim as Philip Seymour Hoffman began with a wrestling injury and a crush on a girl.
A doctor had ordered the tow-headed Hoffman to give up sports, including baseball and football, at upstate Fairport HS, and he joined the drama club instead — because an attractive girl who passed him in a hall said she wanted to audition for a play.
He followed her into the club. The girl was more interested in his older brother, but Hoffman won a minor role of Radar in a school production of “MASH.”
“Then, all of a sudden, it’s not about the crush,” he said nearly 20 years later. “All of a sudden, you realize you like doing theater.”
It was the first time Hoffman stole the scene from the top-billed talent — an experience he would repeat in movies with Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Robin Williams and Al Pacino and on stage with Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy among many others.
By 1984, at age 16, the son of a Rochester-area Xerox employee and a lawyer won a place in the New York State Summer School of the Arts and a spot at an acting camp at Saratoga Springs.
Admission to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts brought him to New York. He got an apartment in Brooklyn that he boasted held just him and a futon. He worked in a deli, won small parts off-Broadway and on “Law & Order” and adopted his personal uniform — sweatshirt, pants, baseball cap.
He became known professionally as Philip Seymour Hoffman in a series of minor roles he made memorable, often by making the audience squirm. His performance as a “fatso voyeur mouth-breather” in 1998’s “Happiness,” earned him a place “in the Movie Pervert Hall of Fame,” wrote critic David Edelstein.
He graduated to meatier, but still minor roles — in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “The Big Lebowski” and “Almost Famous” — and joined more impressive casts.
In a 2001 Shakespeare in the Park production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” Hoffman shared the stage with two of his acting heroes, Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken, along with Natalie Portman, Kevin Kline and John Goodman. It was the 5-foot-10, 230-pound minor character with a deep, resonating voice who was impossible to forget.
Hoffman was notoriously private. He was buttoned up — sometimes literally.
Playwright John Patrick Shanley recalled how Hoffman and Hoffman’s longtime girlfriend, Mimi O’Donnell, dropped in on a party at Shanley’s home.
Hoffman arrived wearing three coats and a hat.
“Take off one of the coats,” Shanley said. “It’s hot in here.”
O’Donnell said, “He’ll maybe take it off in a half-hour.”
But in interviews, Hoffman revealed what acting cost him.
He said he was “changed, permanently changed” at age 12, when he saw his first stage play, Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.”
“But that deep kind of love comes at a price,” he added. “For me, acting is tortuous.”
There is some luck in all great success, and Hoffman was fortunate that two of his Saratoga Springs camp friends, Dan Futterman and Bennett Miller, worked overtime with him on what seemed a bizarre movie project about the writer Truman Capote.
When Hoffman heard the real Capote’s high-pitched lisp, he said, “There’s no way I’m going to do that . . . If we never get the money, we’ll all be off the hook.”
But Futterman wrote the screenplay, and Hoffman got the money. Miller directed, and the result, “Capote,” got Hoffman his Best Actor Oscar.
But Hoffman made clear he would never give up the rush he got performing live on stage.
“That is a drug,” he told “60 Minutes” in 2006. “That’s something you get addicted to.”