EACH time an interviewer sat him down—fair hair messed in a squiff, belly wobbling under his T-shirt, mouth still yawning—they wanted to find out who he was. What he was doing, what he had done, who he was with. It struck Philip Seymour Hoffman that they didn’t need to know any of those things. This urge to impose a structure on chaos—it might be the wrong structure. They’d be more surprised by his work if they didn’t try.

After all, he seemed to have been everyone and everything. A rich, sneering oaf called Freddie in “The Talented Mr Ripley”, savagely plinking the keys of a priceless piano, and jumping out of his little car to kiss the air and shout, “God, don’t you just want to fuck every woman you see just once?” The solemn, dough-faced Father Flynn in “Doubt” (2008), smoothly beating away the nuns’ insinuation that he had abused an altar boy. In “Boogie Nights” (1997) the clumsy, child-like Scotty J, a gay boom-operator in love with a porn star, who begged him to ride in his new red Corvette and pleaded to be allowed to kiss him on the mouth, but was rebuffed on both counts and sat in the car crying. And in “The Master” (2012) red-faced and military-moustached, a cult-leader who softly and repeatedly asked the squirming Joaquin Phoenix, “Do you believe that God will save you from your own ridiculousness?” and could then explode into obscenity as if the devil was in him.

“The Master” was more or less a lead role, but that was unusual. He was too pudgy to look romantic or heroic. He made his name as a player of little parts, someone the director could bring in to provide a jolt of life, because in two minutes’ screen time he could steal a film. He did it in “Along Came Polly”, as Ben Stiller’s crude friend, shooting and missing basketball hoops and squeezing extra grease onto his slice of pizza. Even more skilfully, and briefly, he did it as the oily PA in “The Big Lebowski”, fawningly showing off the great man’s awards: “This picture was taken when Mrs Reagan was First Lady of the nation, yes yes, not of California.”

Since he could make everyone laugh and cringe like this, interviewers would ask him if he had fun. No, he didn’t. Acting was hard, concentrated work, “like lugging weights upstairs with your head” (or, when he came on stage as Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman”, staggering under sample cases). Well, perhaps it had been fun at the start, when his mother prompted him to fall in love with theatre, and he had gone off to drama school at New York University feeling the world was his. He stacked shelves for a living until “Scent of a Woman” came up in 1992, the first and youngest of his boorish-friend roles.

He was asked how he prepared. That would trigger a hand through the messy hair and mumbles of uncertainty. He began by wanting to explore the character, but it wasn’t good unless he got into some “real uncomfortable” place, where he would start to move and talk unconsciously like them. For “Capote”, for which he won an Oscar in 2006, he locked himself away for months to study Capote’s works, his baby voice and self-regarding walk. Then he added little things: a lightly twitching upper lip, a languorous scratching of the parting of his hair, and a way of holding his cigarette as delicately as a flower.

His characters were often sweaty and slobby, but then again they could be, like Capote, super-neat. He did malice and self-loathing like no one else; he could do hurting and shy. His speciality was to add grace-notes to trash. Whether ordinary Joe or monster, each character shivered with complexity. But not one of them, he said, was himself. Not one of them was the man the neighbours saw sitting on the scaffolding of his New York building, reading, in his socks. Once the film was wrapped, it was goodbye. Even the tongue-tied, shambling, middle-aged lead in the first film he directed, “Jack Goes Boating” (2010)—who learned to swim to get off with a girl, and wore his woolly hat indoors—was not him. But Jack had some of his attitude: the need to keep reinventing, moving on to the next thing. At times he seemed to be popping up in almost every American film.

At the controls

The character that stayed with him and the film that most impressed him was “Synecdoche, New York” (2008). He played a theatre director—obsessed with death, and ageing as he never did—who reconstructed New York actual-size and, for decades, controlled the doings of the inhabitants. Just to control his own life would be great, he often said. It was what he spent the most time trying to do. To find the storyline and the path through. To go to sleep each night without profound regrets, when life kept throwing things at him.

At drama school, wanting it all in every sense, he had binged on drink and drugs to the point where he feared they would kill him. At 22, he went into rehab. He stayed clean for 23 years, but seldom without ferocious craving and the feeling that he could slip back there. Last year he checked into rehab again, despite an apparently happy life with Mimi O’Donnell and the children who, for some years, had given a structure to the chaos. Americans did not seem to pass judgment on the frightening amounts of heroin found around him when he died. They just felt, as many others did, deprived of a man they still wanted to get to know.