Philip Seymour Hoffman, perhaps the most ambitious and widely admired American actor of his generation, who gave three-dimensional nuance to a wide range of sidekicks, villains and leading men on screen and embraced some of the theater’s most burdensome roles on Broadway, died on Sunday at an apartment in Greenwich Village he was renting as an office. He was 46.

The death, from an apparent drug overdose, was confirmed by the police. Mr. Hoffman was found in the apartment by a friend who had become concerned after being unable to reach him. Investigators found a syringe in his arm and, nearby, an envelope containing what appeared to be heroin.

Mr. Hoffman was long known to struggle with addiction. In 2006, he said in an interview with “60 Minutes” that he had given up drugs and alcohol many years earlier, when he was 22. Last year he checked into a rehabilitation program for about 10 days after a reliance on prescription pills resulted in his briefly turning again to heroin.

“I saw him last week, and he was clean and sober, his old self,” said David Bar Katz, a playwright, and the friend who found Mr. Hoffman and called 911. “I really thought this chapter was over.”

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A stocky, often sleepy-looking man with blond, generally uncombed hair who favored the rumpled clothes more associated with an out-of-work actor than a star, Mr. Hoffman did not cut the traditional figure of a leading man, though he was more than capable of leading roles.

In his final appearance on Broadway, in 2012, he put his Everyman mien to work in portraying perhaps the American theater’s most celebrated protagonist — Willy Loman, Arthur Miller’s title character in “Death of a Salesman.” At 44, he was widely seen as young for the part — the casting, by the director Mike Nichols, was meant to emphasize the flashback scenes depicting a younger, pre-disillusionment Willy — and though the production drew mixed reviews, Mr. Hoffman was nominated for a Tony Award.

“Mr. Hoffman does terminal uncertainty better than practically anyone,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, “and he’s terrific in showing the doubt that crumples Willy just when he’s trying to sell his own brand of all-American optimism.”

In supporting roles, he was nominated three times for Academy Awards — as a priest under suspicion of sexual predation in “Doubt” (2008); as a C.I.A. agent especially eloquent in high dudgeon in “Charlie Wilson’s War” (2007); and as a charismatic cult leader in “The Master” (2012).

But he won in the best actor category for “Capote” (2005). As the eccentrically sociable, brilliantly probing and unflappably gay author of “In Cold Blood,” Mr. Hoffman flawlessly affected the real-life Truman Capote’s distinctly nasal, high-pitched voice and the naturally fey drama of his presence. Writing in The Times, A. O. Scott described the film as being about a writer’s relationship with his work.

“This makes for better drama than you might expect,” Mr. Scott wrote. “Capote’s human connections are, for the most part, secondary and instrumental, which makes Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance all the more remarkable, since he must connect with the audience without piercing the membrane of his character’s narcissism

“Not only does Mr. Hoffman achieve an impressive physical and vocal transformation — mimicking Capote’s chirpy drawl and appearing to shrink to his elfin stature — but he also conveys, with clarity and subtlety, the complexities of Capote’s temperament.”

Mr. Hoffman appeared in more than 50 films in a career that spanned less than 25 years; in the early 1990s he had small roles in “Leap of Faith,” which starred Steve Martin as a faith healer, and “Scent of a Woman,” in which he played a prep school classmate of Chris O’Donnell, the weekend escort of a blind former military officer on a New York City jaunt, played by Al Pacino, who won an Oscar for the role.

He appeared in big-budget Hollywood films — including “Mission: Impossible III” (2006), “Moneyball” (2011) and “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” (2013) — and critically praised independent films, including “The Savages” (2007), in which he and Laura Linney, as his sister, struggle to care for their declining father; “Synecdoche, New York” (2008), Charlie Kaufman’s offbeat drama in which he played a moody theater director wrangling with his work and women; and “A Late Quartet,” about a violinist in the midst of dual crises, familial and musical.

But citing the highlights of Mr. Hoffman’s prolific work life — which included directing and acting in Off Broadway shows for the Labyrinth Theater Company, a New York City troupe, which he served for a time as artistic director — undervalues his versatility and his willingness, rare in a celebrity actor, to explore the depths of not just creepy or villainous characters, but especially unattractive ones. He was a chameleon of especially vivid colors in roles that called for him to be unappealing.

He played an obsequious sycophant in the Coen brothers’s cult comedy “The Big Lebowski” (1998); a former child star pathetically desperate to reclaim his celebrity in “Along Came Polly” (2004), a romantic comedy that starred Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston; a chronic masturbator in Todd Solondz’s portrait of suburban New Jersey, “Happiness” (1998); a snooty Princetonian in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999); a weaselly tabloid reporter who gets his comeuppance (he’s glued to a wheelchair and set on fire) in “Red Dragon” (2002), an adaptation of one of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels; and in the role that brought him his first renown, he was Scotty J., a shy, overweight, gay boom operator on a pornographic film in “Boogie Nights” (1997).

In addition to “Death of a Salesman,” Mr. Hoffman appeared as the anguished and violent playwright, Konstantin, in Mr. Nichols’s production of “The Seagull” at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 2001, and on Broadway in two other long and difficult roles.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/movies/philip-seymour-hoffman-actor-dies-at-46.html