Hoffman master of the oddball

Philip Seymour Hoffman says getting to know Capote so he could play him was a long and demanding process.

With each passing day, the odds get shorter. He was named Best Actor in the Golden Globes, which are commonly a predictor of Oscar results.

The National Society of Film Critics, along with critics' circles in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and London voted him the best of the year. It seems hard to imagine that his run will come to an end before Oscar night.

Bet money on it, but don't expect a big payout: Philip Seymour Hoffman will win the Academy Award for Best Actor. And it will be no more than he deserves for his title role performance in Capote, the intense and spellbinding biopic of the New York writer who flared through the 50s and early 60s before fizzling and slouching towards death in 1986.

The name may be unfamiliar, but you'll never forget that face. Hoffman, 38, one of the busiest and best actors of his generation, has animated supporting roles in some memorable movies: he has been (in no particular order) an obese phone-sex pest in Happiness; Chris O'Donnell's odious classmate in Scent of A Woman: a neurotic playwright in David Mamet's moviemaking satire State and Main; the greasy assistant to The Big Lebowski in the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski; Jason Robards' nurse in Magnolia; Adam Sandler's foulmouthed tormentor in Punch-Drunk Love; the creepy Scotty, the unrequited admirer of Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights; the benighted Freddy Miles, the unwitting member of a toxic triangle in The Talented Mr Ripley.

The list goes on, and there's a theme emerging. Hoffman is the first to admit he is not leading-man material. Most of his work has been playing people who are most charitably described as dysfunctional.

His newest part is in the same mould: he plays the central figure in a powerful, yet delicately modulated American tragedy. Capote is the story of a writer so consumed by writing that his moral compass becomes jammed.

The result, the film invites us to conclude, was that his life went into a tailspin he was powerless to pull out of. One book made him rich and famous, but he never completed another. The price of his spectacular success was his gradual but inevitable destruction.

At the heart of the movie Hoffman, who is in virtually every scene, turns in a performance of astonishing virtuosity. It's superfluous to say that he has the mannerisms down pat because there's much more than mimicry going on here. Hoffman's Capote is a man corroding before our eyes from the inside out, even as he ascends in the public mind to the status of a superstar.

Capote covers only the period during which the author researched and wrote In Cold Blood, the 1966 book that made him a household name. The book is generally regarded as marking the invention of the "non-fiction novel" although Daniel Defoe, who is generally regarded as having invented the novel, would probably wonder why he bothered writing Journal of the Plague Year or even Robinson Crusoe.

Certainly it was a literary sensation, the result of the writer's realisation that he couldn't tell the story he wanted to tell even in the generous space of the New Yorker article he had been assigned to write.

In Cold Blood starts with the 1959 murders of a Kansas farming family by two drifters. But it's less a murder thriller or a police procedural than it is a portrait of the artist, an extravagantly gay New York writer who sees the small news story in the New York Times and heads into the heart of the Old West to get to know it better. He meets and befriends the killers and becomes uncomfortably entwined in their long-running legal battle to avoid execution. And all the while he dreams of a book of which he wrote to a friend "Sometimes, when I think how good it could be, I can hardly breathe."

There are many roles in Philip Seymour Hoffman's repertoire, but he does Bored Interview Subject well. He phones on a Saturday morning and announces himself in a surly mumble as "Phil". Then he proceeds to respond to enthusiastic questioning from a genuine admirer as though it were faintly insulting. At one point, he sounds like he's either picking his teeth or eating; at another, asked to explain why he thinks that working in the theatre doesn't necessarily make you a better actor, he says "It just doesn't" and lapses into what sounds like defiant silence.

Doing interviews is an occupational hazard for actors, of course: it's invariably a contractual obligation and they find themselves answering the same questions posed in different accents from Auckland to Aberdeen, from Santiago to Singapore. Still, you'd think that, with his range of skills, he'd be able to fake gracious for 20 minutes, if only to indulge someone who got up at 7am on a Saturday to talk to him.

But it seems beyond him. Only when we move from the subject of acting and the nature of celebrity and start talking about Capote and Capote does Hoffman show any signs of warming to the discussion. The recording of our conversation yields only a few moments of interest and many long minutes where all you can hear is the squeak of an interviewer trying to get blood from a stone. Some highlights ...

The man who plays Capote says he was never a Capote fan. "I knew who he was and why he was famous but I wasn't a fan either way.

"It was the script that drew me to him. I began to see that this wasn't simply an odd man, an odd writer. The place he went to writing In Cold Blood is a place lot of people go to, I think. He struggled with who he was. He struggled with finding his place in the world. I think he struggled with how much attention he wanted to cast on himself."

Getting to know Capote so he could play him was a long and demanding process, Hoffman says. "I had videotapes and audiotapes and people I talked to and the excellent biography [Capote by Gerald Clarke] that the film is based on. And an hour and half a day for about five months, I just worked on all that stuff. I used all those tools to get closer and closer to playing the guy."

What is visible on the screen is an act of impersonation that is chillingly authentic but the performance transcends mere mimicry. Hoffman says that getting the breathless fey voice, the languid pose, the hooded eyes right was only the start of inhabiting the role.

"Looking like Capote is a given to the story. When Capote shows up in the middle of Kansas in 1959 in a camel-hair coat he's a sort of iconic presence.

"But it's not just imitation, you know what I'm saying? If you give yourself over to it, it eventually transcends into something artistic. You do the groundwork, you get in that room every day for an hour or two but it wasn't just imitation, it wasn't just mimicry, it was creating a character, a real guy. And that was a process of trial and error."

Having said that, he didn't stay, Rod Steiger-like, in character each night.

"I didn't really go to shops and stuff. That would have been frightening, I think. It's just a kind of athletic thing. You have to stay limber.

"The way you're speaking and behaving physically is what you've been training for, really, so when you get there it's like when you are running a race - it's very hard to start running again if you stop, so you don't stop. You have to stay in the energy of the part.

"Certainly his voice range is so different from mine that I tried to keep that going because if I let it go, it was just too much energy to get it back up again. But I was me, you know. I might have sounded like Capote but when you talked to me I was me."

If Capote adds one more to the list of dysfunctional oddballs Hoffman has played, he's not about to spot a trend.

"I really don't know any people who aren't dysfunctional," he says. "In a few roles I've played people who are quite functional but in very difficult situations. But I really don't think human beings are functional creatures. I think they are dysfunctional creatures trying to function as best they can. Show me a person who's got it all together from morning to night with no oddities or weirdnesses and I'll, well, you can't."

Hoffman's just finished shooting Mission: Impossible III, his only blockbuster apart from a supporting role in 1996's Twister. He plays a principal villain and said he had a lot of fun, not least because the director was a buddy of his.

But he promises the big budget productions are not going to distract him from the small, independent films that have been his daily bread and our frequent pleasure.

LOWDOWN

WHO: Philip Seymour Hoffman, actor.

BORN: July 23, 1967, Fairport, New York.

KEY ROLES: Cold Mountain (2003); Owning Mahowny (2003); Punch-Drunk Love (2002); Almost Famous (2000); The Talented Mr Ripley (1999); Happiness (1998); Big Lebowski (1998); Boogie Nights (1997).

LATEST: Capote, opens February 18.