![]() ![]() I always felt there was plenty of time, but he never lived that way. Maybe he just knew what was important to him and where he wanted to invest his love. ![]() He never said those words, but he lived his life as if time was precious. “When I look back at how close we all were, I wonder whether Phil somehow knew that he was going to die young. That’s the small difference, the little bit of progress that we’ve made.” We talk about him constantly, only now we can talk about him without instantly crying. “It’s been almost four years since Phil died,” O’Donnell goes on to say, “and the kids and I are still in a place where that fact is there every day. There was no sense of peace or relief, just ferocious pain and overwhelming loss.” “I had been expecting him to die since the day he started using again, but when it finally happened it hit me with brutal force,” she writes. Then he started using again, and three days later he was dead.” Phil came home from Atlanta, and I called a few people and said that we needed to keep an eye on him. We began making plans to set up another rehab as soon as the movie wrapped, but I knew we had a difficult path ahead of us.” I called and texted him and said, ‘I’m here to talk.’ At that point, we had started to shift things over to me financially, because Phil knew that when he was using he wasn’t responsible. He was in Atlanta filming The Hunger Games. “Some time in January, Phil started isolating himself. I just had to figure out: How do I live with him? And how do I do it without caregiving or enabling, and in a way that protects the kids and me?” “It’s difficult to stay in a relationship with an active addict. I bowed my head and thought, I can’t fix this. O’Donnell describes Hoffman’s multiple visits to rehab and subsequent relapses as “a struggle, heartbreaking to watch”, adding: “For the first time I realised that his addiction was bigger than either of us. Within a day or two of returning, he started using again.” In some of the conversations that we had while he was there, Phil was so open and vulnerable that they remain among the most intimate moments of our time together. “Phil tried to stop on his own, but detoxing caused him agonising physical pain, so I took him to rehab. Every night, when he went out, I wondered: Will I see him again?” That’s what happens with heroin.” Every day was filled with worry. “As soon as Phil started using heroin again, I sensed it, terrified. It scared him enough that, for a while, he kept his word.” He told me that it was just this one time, and that it wouldn’t happen again. But something was brewing.”ĭetailing Hoffman’s spiral into alcohol and drug use, O’Donnell recalls: “He started having a drink or two without it seeming a big deal, but the moment drugs came into play, I confronted Phil, who admitted that he’d gotten ahold of some prescription opioids. He’d been sober for so long that nobody seemed to notice. He was making film after film-we had a big family and had bought a bigger apartment-and AA started to get short shrift. The thing he hated most was the loss of anonymity. Phil had a love/hate relationship with acting. Other things were more specific: His longtime therapist died of cancer, which was devastating, and he had a falling out with a bunch of his AA friends. “Some of what Phil was going through was common to men in their 40s, such as the pangs of finding yourself middle-aged and feeling as though you’re losing your sexual currency (something many women experience at a much younger age), or seeing your friends’ marriages fall apart in the wake of infidelities. Phil was so open about it all that I wasn’t worried.” That wasn’t an issue for me, and I was happy not to drink, either. He told me that, as much as he loved me, if I used drugs it would be a deal breaker. He was being honest for me – This is who I am – but also to protect himself. But he was aware that just because he was clean didn’t mean the addiction had gone away. Being sober and a recovering addict was, along with acting and directing, very much the focus of his life. He was in therapy and AA, and most of his friends were in the program. He told me about his period of heavy drinking and experimenting with heroin in his early 20s, and his first rehab at 22. Of Hoffman’s addiction struggles, O’Donnell writes: “From the beginning, Phil was very frank about his addictions. He would never sit and stew, or leave an argument unresolved.” He was a sensitive person, and he was incapable of masking his anger. She adds: “My memories of Phil are overwhelmingly of a sweet and gentle and loving man, which is not to say that he didn’t have a temper, as anyone who knew him well will tell you. It was that I thought, You’re so attractive on every level that I want to be near you as much as I can.” Writing in Vogue, O’Donnell details first meeting Hoffman, saying: “It wasn’t so much that I wanted to date him. ![]()
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