Tales of Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman is that rare thing: a Hollywood actor who delivers remarkable performances without ever stealing the show. Nisha Gopalan searches for his soul

Philip Seymour Hoffman is ready for his close-up. But you might not be ready to look. He wants you to stare deep into his eyes, past his pupils, through his brain, until you've voyeuristically met his id. If Freud were around to witness this, he would be baffled: "Was he breast-fed? Is he gay? Aha! His mother was a feminist."

The actor has earned a reputation for his astounding capacity to evoke adolescent-like confusion. From the chubby, closeted crew guy who clumsily puts the moves on Mark Wahlberg's God-like porn star in Boogie Nights ("Can I kiss you on the mouth?" he splutters, in one of the film's most acutely awkward moments), to the lonely lech with a weakness for crank-calling in Happiness, his characters always manage to get it wrong. "He'll say the unsayable, and do the unthinkable," director Joel Schumacher once commented about the actor. "And he'll take the consequences." You pity and cringe at Hoffman like you would at an unassuming chump in a horror film who's about to meet his demise. Then, to make matters worse, when he does buckle to the circumstances -shamefully retracting his homosexual lust in Boogie Nights, unexpectedly confronted by the object of his stalking in Happiness - he does it so quietly.

His rare talent hasn't gone unnoticed, and in this past year Hoffman has transformed himself into one of the hardest-working men in the entertainment industry.

On screen, he's managed to work with an enviable selection of directors - and he's notable for being one of the leading lights of the Paul Thomas Anderson (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia) posse, along with the equally talented John C Reilly, Philip Baker Hall and Melora Walters. "I've tried to do roles of all stripes that keep the work coming and me interested," Hoffman has said, and the diverse crop of roles he's chosen this year is no exception to that rule. He's the Ivy League asshole Freddie, digging jazz with Jude Law in Rome while being privy to Matt Damon's faade in Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley. He steals the show as a melodramatic drag queen with

X-ray vision into Robert De Niro's soul in Schumacher's Flawless. He offsets Tom Cruise's grandiose self-help guru by playing a stable hospital caretaker in Magnolia. And he'll soon be entering the world of rock'n'roll in the upcoming Cameron Crowe project.

Aside from directing his first play, the off-Broadway In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings, he can also be seen on stage in New York at present, starring opposite Magnolia co-star and longtime friend John C Reilly in True West. It's a black comedy by Sam Shepard about two brothers - a self-important screenwriter and a small-time thief - who duke out their differences. (With what most actors would regard as pure masochism, as well as being testament to a broad range, Hoffman will periodically switch roles with his co-star.) At the end of this performance, where he's played the straight-laced yuppie, Hoffman is ragged with sweat, his breath short and his hair messy. While he takes a bow, his spent face stares blindly into the audience. He looks like a deer caught in headlights, or, more appropriately, like a deer who's just been hit by a car and is gazing back at the driver in disbelief. "That's what I get for purging my soul?" he seems to be thinking, "Applause?"

This chameleon-like actor deserves an Academy award for his troubles - though he's unlikely ever to get one. His talent of magnificently understating even the most sensational character is his Achilles heel. He'll take that contrived speech and meld it so well into the scene that you'll never know what hit you. Tom Cruise can't do that. Tom Cruise has an Oscar nomination. Remember Hoffman in Scent Of A Woman?

In Twister? In The Big Lebowski? That's the point. It's only when you link these background performances together that you realise just how good he is.

Before Hoffman was an on-screen guide into the recesses of the human psyche, he was like any other American kid growing up in Rochester, New York. He played baseball and football in school, and competed on the wrestling team. His hormones soon got the better of him, and after a sports injury he pursued theatre to pursue girls. (Yes, he's straight.) This was actually an act of rebellion for the actor, who, along with his three other siblings, was raised by his strong-willed mother. "She's a staunch feminist, so I grew up with strong feminist messages," he says of her. "As a result, I battled her in my teenage years because my image of being a man was a deformed one."

Perhaps that's why the actor, who ultimately enrolled in New York University's drama school, reinvents himself as frantically as Madonna changes hairstyles. He did the De Niro Raging Bull thing for Happiness - beefing out his already considerable girth to reach 235 pounds - and the Dustin Hoffman Tootsie thing for Flawless, taping, tucking, and cinching himself into female form. But for his next big screen role, in David Mamet's State And Main, a slimmer Hoffman will do the unthinkable: he'll play a romantic lead. (The closest he ever got to this was in the small film Next Stop, Wonderland, playing an obnoxious activist who's more enamoured of communist propaganda than his girlfriend.) State is an unlikely move for the actor, but then one could argue that of virtually every role he takes. "It's something I'd love to do," he says of romantic comedies. "But to tell you the truth, there haven't been parts like that that I've wanted very badly in my career and didn't get, because a lot of them go to - and I'm not putting myself down here - better-looking guys."

He's unlikely ever to be leading man material. But then that's Hoffman's appeal. A $20 million paycheque might ensure a tidy profit, but it can't buy raw talent. "Philip doesn't have the pretty, pouty, little-boy look that makes young men overnight sex symbols," Schumacher commented on his star. "But the good news is, he will work forever and do the most fascinating roles. He probably has already."