One of the best actors of our generation. Very very sad news.

Picking my favorite Philip Seymour Hoffman scene from a film is difficult since the man positively rocked the screen in every movie he was in. Hoffman specialized in playing characters who were untrustworthy, weak, pathetic, or duplicitous. While he won the Oscar for “Capote” and was brilliant in “The Master, his role as the hospice nurse in “Magnolia” is perhaps his most heroic and the one that I feel is his most underrated. In a film full of characters who are experiencing life at its worst, his efforts to fulfill the dying wish of Jason Robards’s character to reunite with his estranged son are a wonder to behold.

Honorable mention: Hoffman’s portrayal of Lester Bangs in “Almost Famous”. It’s too bad he never got the chance to play him in a feature-length Bangs biopic.