What a difference 48 years makes. When the announcement came last week about folk singer Pete Seeger’s death at the age of 94, I thought about how well he had lived his life, and what an extraordinary run he enjoyed, being involved with so many of the important social and political issues for most of his time on Earth.
Then, on Sunday, I felt only anger upon learning that Philip Seymour Hoffman had died. Hoffman was one of a very few actors whose movies I watch simply because they have a role. Katherine Keener, John Cusack, Penelope Cruz and James Gandolfini come to mind.
My response to Hoffman’s death, of course, was purely selfish. But anger turned to sadness as I processed the circumstances. To die with a heroin needle in his arm was all the more pathetic knowing that he had been drug free for more than 20 years until a prescription medication helped his addiction regain a foothold a couple of years ago.
If a generation should ever have a hero, Pete Seeger would have served quite nicely for mine. As children we saw him on TV variety shows as a member of the Weavers and as a solo performer. But my real discovery of his work came when I ordered Pete Seeger’s Greatest Hits album from the Columbia Record Club when I was a teenager. On the cover is a photo of Seeger seated on a piano stool, guitar lying flat on his lap. Seeger wears a vest and he holds his glasses as though he has just removed them to look into the camera lens. A banjo lies on the floor beside him.
I played that album hundreds of times, and that particular version of We Shall Overcome still sends shivers down my spine. During the sing-along, Seeger says, “But the most important verse is the one they wrote down in Montgomery, Alabama. They said, ‘We are not afraid.’ And the young people taught everybody else a lesson. All the older people who had learned how to compromise, and learned how to take it easy, and learned how to get along, and leave things as they were. And the young people taught us all a lesson: We are not afraid! We are not afraid! We are not afraid today! Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome someday!”
No one, repeat no one, has ever been better at engaging an audience from a stage. He had a wonderful voice, too.
Hoffman grabbed my attention, and became a star, because he excelled in taking small roles and making them important. The majority of his parts did not cast him in the lead, but rather as a supporting actor. One of the most subtle scene-stealers in movie history, Hoffman could capture the sympathy and attention of an audience like few others. When his character got drunk on New Year’s Eve and planted a kiss on the lips of the porn star played by Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights, the effect was profound. I rewatched the movie on Sunday and found myself near tears at the anguish Hoffman’s character displayed after realizing the risk he had taken would not be rewarded.
He also played a wonderful part in one of my very favourite movies. In State and Main he played the playwright Joseph Turner White, a man completely out of his depth in writing a screenplay and dealing with the unethical machinations of movie making. How many actors could so easily dominate scenes as they shared the set with Sarah Jessica Parker, Alec Baldwin, Charles Durning, William H. Macey and David Paymer, all world class scene stealers in their own right?
If Pete Seeger’s legacy will be that of a man whose life was well lived, Hoffman will be remembered in a more negative light. With his lengthy list of great performances his might not exactly have been a life wasted, but fans had every reason to believe that he had many, many roles left in him.
In the end, it was addiction that claimed Hoffman and deep belief that he could make a difference that sustained Seeger for nearly a century. Seeger died, surrounded by family, in his 70th year of marriage to one woman. Hoffman left this world alone in his apartment, heroin needle sticking out from his arm. It’s sad that of these two beloved public figures one’s life was stolen by his brain’s desire to distance itself from the same world the other embraced to the end.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.