Philip Seymour Hoffman, 1967-2014

'Not Philip Seymour Hoffman!" read the post from a friend that popped up on Facebook.

Found dead on Sunday from an apparent drug overdose in a Greenwich Village apartment, Hoffman was 46. Last month he was front and center at the Sundance Film Festival, premiering a pair of pictures - God's Pocket, based on the Pete Dexter novel, and A Most Wanted Man, an adaptation of the John le Carré spy thriller. Both will be released this year - with the word posthumous certain to show up in the reviews.

There's always been something a little dangerous about Hoffman, whether in small roles or large. He's played his share of weirdos and outcasts, bad guys and tyrants, gay men and straight, loners, lovers, losers, clowns. He could do self-loathing, he could inhabit rage, he could be cool. But invariably, whoever and whatever he was, Hoffman brought intensity, intelligence, a lack of vanity, and a deep sense of craft to his work.

Hoffman, who led a passionate parallel career on stage, took home the best-actor Academy Award in 2006 for his dead-on turn as In Cold Blood author Truman Capote in the Capote biopic, and had been nominated for three supporting-actor Oscars - for Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Doubt (2008), and, most recent, The Master (2012). The latter, in which he played a charismatic cult leader, modeled on Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, marked the actor's fifth collaboration with writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson. Hoffman had been a key member of Anderson's troupe, playing a porn-industry boom operator in Boogie Nights(1997), a morphine-dispensing nurse in Magnolia (1999), a menacing phone-sex biz operator in Punch-Drunk Love (2002). Small roles, some of these, but they left big impressions.

In the Coen Brothers' rightly celebrated stoner noir The Big Lebowski (1998), Hoffman is another supporting player - the title character's faithful assistant, facilitating, running messages, on the periphery. He was unforgettable as the preppie, sweaty, suspicious friend in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). He played rock critic god Lester Bangs in Almost Famous (2000), Major League Baseball's Art Howe opposite Brad Pitt in Moneyball (2011).

And last November, a kazillion Hunger Games fans discovered Hoffman, as he stepped into the role of Plutarch Heavensbee, the Head Gamemaker, in the second installment of the box office megahit Catching Fire. Even in this pop sci-fi fantasy, with its over-the-top getups and crazy coifs, Hoffman brought nuance and gravitas to the affair - all with a glint of playfulness in his eye. (Filming of the third and fourth episodes,The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 and Part 2 began last fall. Hoffman had completed his scenes forPart 1, and, according to Lionsgate, had only a week left on Part 2. The studio has indicated that the November 2015 release for Part 2 will not be affected.)

If there is a role, and a film, that will be particularly hard to look at now, it is Hoffman's Andy Hanson, a New York real estate exec, in Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007). Andy is a heroin and cocaine addict, he's embezzling from his company, and he is so desperate that he plots with his brother (Ethan Hawke) to rob their own parents' jewelry store. Things go fatally wrong.

Hoffman, who had been in and out of rehab (reportedly as recently as last year), had spoken about his problems with alcohol and substance abuse. In a 2011 interview with the Guardian, he discussed the binge-drinking he started in on when he was studying theater at New York University. He told the reporter he had stopped.

"I had no interest in drinking in moderation," he said. "And I still don't. Just because all that time's passed doesn't mean maybe it was just a phase. . . . That's who I am."

I interviewed Hoffman at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008, where he was promotingSynecdoche, New York, written and directed by his friend Charlie Kaufman. Hoffman plays a theater director whose psyche is exposed in surreal tableaus. He's on screen for almost every frame.

It's a movie about the passage of time. About illness. About death.

"Isn't it heartbreaking that we all have to die?" Hoffman said about the role, about the film, on that September day in Toronto. "And that we might see our children die, and we're not going to understand? We're never going to feel like we're finished, and we wish we would but we don't . . . .

"These things sound depressing - but no, that's life. That's what it is. And that's beautiful and that's sad and that's a lot of things."

Hoffman's body was found Sunday by his friend David Bar Katz, the Philadelphia playwright. "I saw him last week, and he was clean and sober, his old self," Katz told the New York Times. The actor leaves behind three children, a boy and two girls, with his partner of many years, the costume designer Mimi O'Donnell, also a Philadelphia native.

O'Donnell's family released a statement:

"We are devastated by the loss of our beloved Phil and appreciate the outpouring of love and support. This is a tragic and sudden loss and we ask that you respect our privacy during this time of grieving."