Philip Seymour Hoffman found dead after ‘drug overdose’

Reports from New York say that the Oscar winning actor award-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has been found dead Sunday afternoon in his apartment in Manhattan.

The New York police department is investigating the cause of death and report he suffered an “apparent drug overdose”.

He was found in his bathroom in the Manhattan’s Greenwich Village at 11.30am local time. Police were called by a friend of the actor.

Hoffman won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the 2005 film, Capote, and was considered one of the finest actors of his generation.

‘A dangerous talent at work’

Hoffman was a huge figure in America’s acting circles. John Hurt called his death a “devastating loss”. Speaking at the London’s Critic’s Circle Film Awards Hurt, who acted alongside Hoffman in the film Owning Mahowny, said:

“It’s a devastating loss. His contribution was massive.”

Writer David Thomson, author of the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, says in his book of Hoffman:

“He is so good that only the best material is going help build our sense of him. Meanwhile, search him out, as you might Kevin Spacey. There is the same very dangerous talent at work – astounding, yet so pronounced it could help make its own prison.”

I’d have watched Philip Seymour Hoffman in anything. Absolutely anything. RIP.

— Charlie Brooker (@charltonbrooker) February 2, 2014