Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Sister Writes Tribute to Late Actor 10 Years After His Death

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sister Emily Barr remembered his remarkable life in a deeply personal essay 10 years after his death.

“Phil and I loved reading,” she wrote in a piece for The Paris Review on Monday, April 22. “We shared a bedroom until our sister went off to college. We had bunk beds; he slept on the bottom. This way, we could each stay up reading with our own flashlight and not disturb the other—though, of course, we found plenty of other reasons to complain about this setup.”

Emily believed that Philip “based much of his acting technique on watching Gene Wilder scenes.”

“The physical comedy is subtle in that the main character is unaware of his buffoonery — only the audience is in on the joke,” she continued. “Phil did this a lot: we would know that something was up, but the character himself was often clueless. This was true both of Phil’s comedic scenes and more dramatic ones: Sandy Lyle sharting at the party in Along Came Polly, Scotty J. trying to kiss Mark Wahlberg’s character in Boogie Nights, and the CIA agent Gust Avrakotos smashing the window in Charlie Wilson’s War. All three characters possess the same loud, obnoxious physicality.”

Philip died on February 2, 2014, of a drug overdose. Emily continues to watch her brother’s works years after his passing.

“Even now, when I watch Phil playing these parts in films that now capture a distant past, in roles that have become familiar to us, I can see so much of who he was,” the nurse practitioner penned. “He was a cuddly person, much more so than me. He loved to sit close on a couch, walk arm in arm down the street, and hug big.”

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Emily also appreciated her brother’s “loud parts,” including his “laughter and big gestures of annoyance.” She remembered the way he teased her and made her laugh.

After Philip’s death at age 46, Emily began saving print articles that mentioned her brother. She put the clippings in an old cigar box.

“Phil would think I was ridiculous for doing all this,” she wrote. “He’d wrap his big arm around me, and we would walk a little quicker as the temperature dropped and the sun set lower in the sky. We would talk, like when we were kids, imagining the story of Encyclopedia Brown trying to solve The Case of the Vanishing Actor, which takes place in a library with a small wooden door.”