Capote at 20: Portraits of the Artists

Last year, following the tenth anniversary of his sudden death, Philip Seymour Hoffman was heralded by The Independent as the greatest actor of the 21st century. This is not to say that virtuosic work — three of my personal favourites being Scottie in Boogie Nights (1997), Rusty Zimmerman in Flawless (1998), and Allen in Happiness (1998) — didn’t feature amongst his nineties corpus, but that his impact as an artist began to gradually bloom after the turn of the millennium. Hoffman had cemented his reputation as one of his generation’s most transformative performers, partially due to his trenchant commitment to privacy to make his on-screen personas more believable, but primarily down to his famously wide-reaching skillset.

Having trained in acting at Tisch, Hoffman went on to work primarily in New York theatre (and delicatessens) while making incremental ripples upon the indie film scene, for example in the early works of Paul Thomas Anderson, with the occasional blockbuster like Scent of a Woman (1992) — otherwise known as ‘the one where Al Pacino goes “Hooah!”’ — entertained along the way. One tends to give pause when faced with the strange case of comparing an actor’s performance style across theatre and film as mediums, however, it is largely accepted that the best actors in cinema have served their sentences on stage, having trained somewhat formally and/or academically. 

Hoffman always preferred the stage, serving as Co-Artistic Director of the off-Broadway LAByrinth Theater Company, of which he had been an active member since 1995, where he produced and directed several productions including Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Last Days of Judas Iscariot; his final stage part was the tapestried Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, Death of a Salesman. Clearly, Hoffman was at home in leading parts on stage, more so than on screen, where his reputation remains as an esteemed character actor in supporting or featured roles — the exceptions being the divisive Synecdoche, New York (2007) and Hoffman’s Oscar-winning titular turn in Bennett Miller’s Capote, which turns 20 years old on February 24, 2025. 

By contrast, Truman Capote oscillated to the places he could be seen. As the film Capote exhibits, the writer was as much a showboating denizen of East Coast cafe society as he was a fine troubled observer of everyday life. Having achieved a whirlwind of acclaim at twenty-one with his poignant and surrealist character study, ‘Miriam’, the Southern author went on to achieve national recognition for his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s — later adapted into the iconic Audrey Hepburn movie — and notoriety for his novel Other Voices, Other Rooms. By the time the Clutter family murders occurred in 1959, Capote was already relatively famous, a sought-after contributor to major publications like Holiday Magazine and The New Yorker which ran his book about the murders, In Cold Blood, as a four-part serial throughout 1965. Capote frequently described it as the first ‘non-fiction novel’, which he believed to be the genesis of a new form altogether: if it wasn’t, then it was the beginning of mainstream true crime as we know it today. Tom Wolfe, who influentially dubbed the movement to which Capote belongs ‘New Journalism’, observed the authenticity of Capote’s approach to detailing the crime itself, building tension with elusiveness until the final display of barbarism; the importation of fictional formalities into the journalistic domain, so to speak. Capote cited In Cold Blood as the book he was always meant to write — though he personally preferred the flourishes of his early texts — and, as the 2005 film hauntingly states before the credits roll, he never finished another. 

Watching Hoffman embody Truman Capote on the verge of his most acclaimed, successful, and immortal piece of work with the wisdom of hindsight, especially knowing that Hoffman would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor and consolidate his reputation as not only a character actor but a sometime leading man, teeters on the verge of ghostlike poetics. It is fitting. The film tells the story of In Cold Blood with severity and an adroit sense of finitude, which is precisely how delving back into the oeuvre of the late Hoffman, possibly the greatest actor of the century of which he only experienced fourteen years, feels. His performance as Truman Capote is truly as mesmeric as it’s made out to be, lucid with the instinct and clarity of an artist inaugurating a tragically short-lived later style. 

Image from Wikimedia Commons