Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

If Philip Seymour Hoffman wasn’t happy, what hope is there for us?

It seems the only sane celebrities are politicians

[Getty Images] 
issue 08 February 2014

Celebrity deaths have no decorum. From Elvis on his toilet to Whitney face down in her bathtub, their last moments sit alongside their songs, or films, or their drunken stumbles out of nightclubs. Kurt Cobain, my teenage idol, had been dead from a shotgun blast to the mouth for — what? Days? Hours, even? — before the newspapers started running photographs of his Converse-clad feet visible through the doorway of the shed in which he died.

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