UPDATE: The funeral guests included Meryl Streep and most of those mentioned below. The tragedy of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death cannot be overstated. If you ranked every actor working now, he’d come up in the top 5. He might have been number 1. That loss is secondary to what his family is experiencing. He will never be forgotten.
Earlier: The wake for Philip Seymour Hoffman was star studded. But of course it resembled a Hollywood event in many ways. A source tells me certain guests were assigned the wake Thursday night and the funeral Friday morning. Some people didn’t make the cut. They’ve been assigned to a memorial service sometime in March.
Only when Hollywood publicists come to town, kids, does a funeral turn into an event you can be blocked from. All they were missing at Frank E. Campbell was a velvet rope. It was quite different from, say, Marvin Hamlisch’s open viewing there in 2012.
Among the familiar faces were the most grieving, I think: Cate Blanchett and husband Andrew Upton. They brought Hoffman to Australia a couple of years ago to direct a production of “True West.” Hoffman stayed with them and their families were close. Also Paul Thomas Anderson, who directed Hoffman in “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” “Punch Drunk Love,” and “The Master.” For a while, Hoffman used to boast, you couldn’t watch a PTA movie without him it.
Hoffman’s co-stars from “The Master,” Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams also attended, as well as Ben Stiller, Josh Hamilton, and Phil’s “Almost Famous” co-star Billy Crudup. A devastated Mike Nichols — who directed Hoffman in “A Death of a Salesman” on Broadway– came with wife Diane Sawyer. Nichols looks like he’s aged from the news of Hoffman’s death.
I guess there will be stake outs in the morning at St. Ignatius of Loyola for more sightings. And maybe a Hollywood publicist with a head set. I always say, I wish Robert Altman could come back and film all of this.