Isabella Wing-Davey, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s assistant, appears to have been with screenwriter David Katz when Katz found Hoffman dead in his Manhattan apartment on Sunday.
Mimi O'Donnell, Hoffman’s girlfriend, called Katz, asking him to go check in on Hoffman after the actor failed to pick up his children.
Katz called Wing-Davey, telling her to unlock the apartment.
The 911 call regarding the death was made from Wing-Davey’s phone, sources told the New York Daily News. The voicemail greeting on her phone gives callers the option to leave a message for “Bella Wing-Davey and Phil.”
Sources told multiple media outlets that dozens of small envelopes were found near Hoffman’s body, some containing heroin, and some said that a syringe was sticking out of the actor’s arm.
Hoffman in a January 19, 2014 photo during the Sundance Film Festival. (Victoria Will/Invision/AP)
A passer-by stops at a makeshift memorial outside the home of Hoffman in Manhattan. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)
Wing-Davey is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
She directed a short film, “Candlesticks,” which Hoffman helped with as assistant director. She declined comment.
“They were friends, very good friends,” Meg Gibson, who worked on “Candlesticks,” told the News.
“She’s grown up with him,” Gibson said of Isabella Wing-Davey. “She’s been by his side in the last two months with everything he’s been working on.”
Wing-Davey’s father, Mark Wing-Davey, chair of the graduate acting department at Tisch, was close friends with Hoffman.
Wing-Davey also graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University, and had just started work on a movie called “The Rain Collector,” which is inspired by the “Rainfall Organisation.”
She has received a string of grants for other movies, such as “Afronauts” and “Flood.”
She had her first feature film directing experience in 2012 on the James Franco produced film Black Dog, Red Dog.
Friends Read Free