Ellen Burstyn Remembers 'Wonderful' Philip Seymour Hoffman On The 10th Anniversary Of His Death

By Emily Richardson | Celebrity | February 2, 2024

Header Image Source: Getty

Today marks ten years since Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death. The actor was only 46-years-old when he passed away from a drug overdose. Philip had struggled with addiction in his youth but had been sober for 23 years before his 2012 relapse. So sad.

Philip’s friend and collaborator, Ellen Burstyn, recently sat down with PEOPLE to remember the late star. The pair appeared together in two films, When a Man Loves a Woman (1994) and Red Dragon (2002), but didn’t get close until Philip directed Ellen in Adly Guirgis’s off-Broadway play, The Little Flower of East Orange in 2008:

“We became friends, and he and his family used to spend holidays at my house; pool parties, picnics, and barbecues.”

91-year-old Ellen says Philip was a “monumental” talent, and “was as talented a director” as he was an actor. She also praises his parenting:

“He was a wonderful and caring father to his three children, and I’m so sad that he got back into drugs after being drug-free for so many years,” the Exorcist star adds. “It’s a terrible tragedy and a great loss, not only to his family but also to the theater and film worlds.”

Philip and his longtime partner, costume designer Mimi O’Donnell, had three kids together. His only son, now-20-year-old Cooper Hoffman, starred in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza in 2021.

In 2017, Mimi wrote an essay for Vogue reflecting on her family’s loss. It’s a fascinating read. Mimi says Philip’s relapse snuck up on her. She knew her partner was an addict, but didn’t realize how vulnerable he still was after so many years sober. Mimi didn’t “fully understand” that addiction is “always lurking just below the surface.”

In 2012, Philip began casually drinking again (against Mimi’s wishes). Then, she found out he was using pills. Pills escalated to heroin. Philip went to rehab, but relapsed two days after getting out. That’s when the couple agreed Philip should move to another apartment around the corner to protect their kids.

In the fall of 2013, Philip tried rehab again. When he left that November, he managed to stay sober for three whole months. But, in January 2014, he “started isolating himself” while filming The Hunger Games in Atlanta. Philip was struggling to stay clean. He and Mimi agreed he would go back to rehab as soon as the movie wrapped. Unfortunately, he never made it:

It happened so quickly. Phil came home from Atlanta, and I called a few people and said that we needed to keep an eye on him. Then he started using again, and three days later he was dead.

Mimi wrote that, in the four years since Philip’s death, “the kids and I are still in a place where that fact is there every day”:

We talk about him constantly, only now we can talk about him without instantly crying. That’s the small difference, the little bit of progress that we’ve made. We can talk about him in a way that feels as though there’s a remembrance of what happened to him, but that also honors him.
We talk about his bad sides and his good sides, what he did that was funny and what he did that was crazy, and what he did that was loving and tender and sweet. We open up, and it brings us together and keeps his spirit alive.

Damn. Life’s not fair, is it? I haven’t seen many celebrity tributes on social media today; maybe because Philip valued his privacy, maybe because his contemporaries aren’t into posting as much as younger celebs. But I really enjoyed this simple/NSFW Instagram tribute from his longtime friend Amy Sedaris: