Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Sister Pens Emotional Tribute 10 Years After His Death

A decade after his sudden death, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s younger sister paid tribute to the late actor with a touching personal essay recalling some of the lightness of their younger years.

In an essay for The Paris Review published on Monday, April 22, Emily Barr reflected on Hoffman’s prolific acting career, the roles that had inspired him in his youth and the loveable figure that he was in their family.

One of the actor’s “absolute favorite” movies was 1975’s The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, Barr shared. Gene Wilder’s character in particular, Sigerson, and his “physical comedy” inspired Hoffman.

“I could swear that Phil based much of his acting technique on watching Gene Wilder scenes like this over and over as a kid,” Barr wrote. “The physical comedy is subtle in that the main character is unaware of his buffoonery—only the audience is in on the joke. Phil did this a lot: we would know that something was up, but the character himself was often clueless.”

Referencing Hoffman’s roles in Along Came Polly, Boogie Nights and Charlie Wilson’s War, she pointed out that “the same loud, obnoxious physicality” can be seen in all three of his diverse performances. In The Savages, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Capote, he displayed the same “physicality,” she wrote, this time in “more nuanced ways.”

“These gestures brought his characters to life, and made us empathize and identify with their excitement, embarrassment, anger, and heartache,” Barr continued. “Even now, when I watch Phil playing these parts in films that now capture a distant past, in roles that have become familiar to us, I can see so much of who he was.”

Barr continued of her late brother, who was found dead of a drug overdose in his New York City apartment in 2014 at age 46, “He was a cuddly person, much more so than me. He loved to sit close on a couch, walk arm in arm down the street and hug big.”

Hoffman, too, had “a lot of loud parts,” she reflected. “Like his laughter and big gestures of annoyance. The way he would jump up and dance around when teasing you—even after you’d pleaded for him to stop, he just couldn’t help poking fun one last time.”

Barr centered the essay around an interaction she had with a librarian at the public library near her home, where she learned that old magazines are donated to neighborhood schools for kids to cut up into collages. After learning of their fate, she checked them all out, went home and “cut all the articles and photos of Phil out of each magazine.”

She wrote, “I didn’t want to read these articles. But I didn’t want children cutting them up in class next year. More importantly, I didn’t want one of my children to be sitting in art class and get handed one of these magazines and open it up to see their uncle Phil.”

After cutting up the magazines, she thought of her brother, and how he would “think I was ridiculous for doing all this.”

“He’d wrap his big arm around me, and we would walk a little quicker as the temperature dropped and the sun set lower in the sky. We would talk, like when we were kids, imagining the story of Encyclopedia Brown trying to solve The Case of the Vanishing Actor, which takes place in a library with a small wooden door,” she wrote, referring to the children’s mystery series that Hoffman “loved.”

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In February, in honor of the anniversary of Hoffman’s death, Ellen Burstyn told PEOPLE that his death was “a terrible tragedy and a great loss, not only to his family but also to the theater and film worlds.”

“He was a wonderful and caring father to his three children, and I’m so sad that he got back into drugs after being drug-free for so many years,” Burstyn, 91, said. “He and his family used to spend holidays at my house; pool parties, picnics and barbecues.”