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

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. Fans would pass them around. Weird, really. If a favourite uncle dies in his bed, you don’t go asking your cousin for a Polaroid, do you?

Within a day of the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman this week, you could see a photograph of his bodybag leaving his New York apartment block, and read about him being found on a bathroom floor, syringe still in his arm. The Daily Mail had a supposedly tragic photograph of him asleep on an aeroplane a few days earlier (because only tragic junkies sleep on aeroplanes) and told us how his children had been playing at a playground nearby. The serious press, meanwhile, pretended to have loftier concerns. ‘Philip Seymour Hoffman had almost completed the Hunger Games shoot,’ reported the Guardian. So that’s all right, then.

For some reason, at least for me, this all felt even more invasive than usual. I didn’t know Hoffman as a human; I hadn’t ever interviewed him, nor even really ever given him much thought when I wasn’t watching him in a film. When I was, though, he was always a welcome face. I remember him first from Boogie Nights (1997), Paul Thomas Anderson’s fantastic depiction of the 1970s porn industry. He had a small part in that, but it was pivotal, because he was the only real human. All the other characters were fantastic, plastic and gymnastic; Moonies for the porn cult.