* Having a drug problem is not being an axe murderer. It's not a sign of shoddy moral character. It means that you have a problem that you have wound up handling in a particular way. Two beloved stars. One - a prolific performer, the other - a promising newcomer. I probably have never seen someone who loved acting as much as Phil. He just wanted to be an actor that reached and affected people. Cory Monteith, as an actor, was appealing in his wholesomeness. Two celebrities who you would least expect to die alone with their drugs. Nature loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger. He knew what the cost would be if he went back into that world. Cory Monteith, a talent on TV. Philip Seymour Hoffman, a force on film. Both fought demons from their past, and lost. Given the extent of the stress he was under, his risk of relapse would've been extremely, extremely high. Two men who triumphed over drug addiction with years of sobriety, only to stumble and crash in eerily similar ways. The vicious cycle of rehab and relapse that will forever link these two stars. The road to fame and fortune is paved with influences, good and bad. Find out what leads some stars to fall under the influence. Copyright Able 2018 Born in Fairport, New York, as the second of four children, Philip Seymour Hoffman is thought to have had a fairly stable childhood, until his father left the family when Philip was just nine years old. From that point on, Philip is raised by his mother. She was a single mother who raised him and his siblings, had the ability to cultivate the creative side in him. Simply a hero to him. Philip's mother introduced him to theatre, which ignited a passion. Philip would go on to make over fifty films in his short career. He wasn't your typical Hollywood leading man. Philip Seymour Hoffman was an everyman anti-hero kind of actor. He was truly an asset to Hollywood. When he finally got a shot at a lead role, he won the Oscar. People lined up to be on the same stage or in front of the camera with him. He was just really curious about people. I think that's another sign of a good actor. But there was one competition that Philip wouldn't win: the one between him and his addiction. What influences was Philip under that led this celebrated actor to such a tragic end? Philip Seymour Hoffman studied drama at the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. It is here where he discovered many loves and many vices. Going at everything in life with such intensity, he starts to develop crutches, and we start to see that with his relationship with food, and alcohol, and marijuana. He has a certain compulsiveness about everything that he does. Philip Seymour Hoffman's compulsive intake of many things ` cigarettes, coffee, food ` describes a very common phenomenon, which is that people with this disorder don't have an off button. Certainly suggests that there was something feeling unbalanced in him that he was trying to get to be normal. But Hoffman isn't just hooked on coffee and cigarettes while in college ` he admitted in an interview years later that he indulged in 'anything I could get my hands on. 'I liked it all.' Once we look back and examine the intensity and the compulsions that we're starting to see with stimulants, it's not hard to figure out how he leaps from coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, and then eventually lands into heroin. When someone develops a drug problem, there's a reason they start with a particular drug, and then there's a reason they stay with a particular drug. No one's partying with heroin. No one is using heroin because it's fun and it's enhancing their experience of their day ` it's 'I need to escape now', and it sounds like Philip Seymour Hoffman was a very good example of that. Under the influence of his compulsive tendencies, Philip attacks his college studies as ferociously as his drug habits. There is absolutely such a thing as a high functioning alcoholic or person with addiction. If you have the ability to maintain yourself and your heroin use without having to get into criminal involvement to support it, you can fly below the radar for a very long time. Philip's drug use eventually becomes a major distraction from his acting. When you're playing a character, you have a responsibility to reveal the life of the person that you're playing, and so I think that he knew that if he wasn't really completely available to allow that role to kind of resonate on him, that that would interfere with the responsibility of an artist. Realizing that his drug use is interfering with his acting career, Hoffman seeks treatment at age 22. Philip Seymour Hoffman seeking help on his own at age 22 speaks to an incredible bravery and insight. When you ask for help, you're giving up a lot of things. You're giving up your security blanket, you're saying that 'whatever reality is, I'm willing to address it, 'rather than live under the influence of this dream anymore.' That tells me quite a lot about him. Hoffman realizes the special gift he's been given with his talent, and almost feels like he owes it to the craft, to the characters that he wants to play to get himself clean, and checks himself into rehab, and successfully cleans himself up. Sometimes your love of the role, or your love of your craft, will actually allow you to make decisions that transcend things that just ordinary people can do. After college, Philip immerses himself in acting. Phil started studying in my private class after the university, and I did a project with him. Phil would remain in character all the time ` really did things that young acting students just didn't do. He took it very seriously. A compulsive actor, in 1992, Philip co-founded the Labyrinth Theatre Company ` a passion project that he would continue through the remainder of his career. Soon after, he meets the love of his life, Mimi O'Donnell, and they'll go on to have three children together. Philip Seymour Hoffman falling in love and starting a family would almost certainly have been a real motivating factor to stay on top of his recovery. With the same passion and commitment that he gives to his career, he gives to his wife and to his family, and it becomes evident that that is what sustains his sobriety throughout those years. I think it was important for him to, uh, keep them safe and safely out of public view. But also, as an actor, he didn't want people to know too much about him, because then you start seeing him as a dad, instead of the character that he was meant to be playing. Philip compulsively auditions and books back to back roles, but he flies under the radar of celebrity. Yeah, I have been around. I've been around, yeah, about ten years, yeah. REPORTER: So does this feel like it's a ten-year overnight success? No, not at all. I think things have been going pretty well for a good six years now, and, uh, in my eyes. You know, I've been working and supporting myself, and that's the most I can ask for. Being the hard worker that he is, Philip soon becomes the most sought-after supporting man in the biz. When you think back to 'The Talented Mr Ripley', to 'Boogie Nights', to 'Magnolia', I think of them as Philip Seymour Hoffman movies. You walked out of the theatre after the end credits, remembering his work as much as you did the lead actors. Hoffman is booking film after film, but no one is taking a chance on him as a lead. Hollywood seems to have a problem with envisioning a man of, you know, his appearance, to be in a leading role, and it's a big challenge for him to make a breakthrough at this point. He wasn't your typical Hollywood leading man. He didn't fit in. Cause he didn't look like Brad Pitt, he didn't look like Johnny Depp. What he looked like was, sort of, the rest of us, and he was able to portray characters with vulnerabilities and failings that actors like Will Smith, Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt just simply can't pull off. He's bringing more to these roles than most leading characters would bring to an entire film. It's almost like he's saying to Hollywood, 'Are you out of your mind, 'not putting me in a leading role?' And Hollywood listens. Finally, in 2005, Philip Seymour Hoffman lands a lead role. He will play iconic novelist Truman Capote in the film Capote. When I heard that Philip Seymour Hoffman would be playing Truman Capote, I thought it was a great match up of actor to character. You've got someone whose physicality was right for the role, but also an actor who was gonna dig a little deeper. Philip Seymour Hoffman was just the actor to look beyond and find the core of Capote. But for Hoffman to play the role of Truman Capote, he'll have to work harder than ever. From the outset, he's crippled by doubts that he'll be able to pull it off. Bad influences can strike at any time. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Cory Monteith were both abusing substances early in their lives, before fame would find them. Once sober, Hoffman went on to play many supporting characters, until finally in 2005, he lands the lead in Capote, and replaces one addiction with another. The idea of making a movie about Truman Capote, at first, I thought was gonna be a very difficult thing. It's so easy to play Truman Capote and make him a caricature of himself, just based on who he was as a person. What you have to do here is make him a real person. You have to look past all the affectations of the real Truman Capote and find the human that's underneath it. It's a role that he almost turned down. He really came to me with Capote. He said, 'I have this role and I really need help with it.' And we really, really worked on trying to access this character that he thought he was so far from, but in real truth, because of his willingness to kind of dig in himself, he saw he really wasn't very far from Truman at all. Under the influence of his obsession with work, Philip spends five months preparing for the role of Capote by dropping weight and consuming all he can about his character. Capote was shot in Winnipeg, and apparently Philip Seymour Hoffman stayed in character the entire time. For Philip Seymour Hoffman, I think that it was important, because he was playing a real life person, to absolutely nail it and get it right. Those around him would describe him being brutal on himself, beating himself up constantly to try to achieve the perfect performance. But all of Hoffman's hard work and dedication pays off ` Capote is a hit, and Philip receives critical acclaim worldwide. He wins Best Actor at the 2006 Oscars. I was very proud of him. I mean, he deserves it. Also knew that this was going to happen to him. It's the kind of actor he was. I loved his acceptance speech for that award. He thanked everyone that everyone always thanks, and then he thanked his mom in a really heartfelt and touching kind of way ` it was about thanking her for how she raised him. It shows the generosity of spirit that he had, and the reason why people lined up to work with him, both on stage and in front of the camera. Under the influence of being a workaholic and an in-demand actor, Philip will star and direct in many New York plays, and appear in over ten films in the coming years. We see him, once again, go right back in to taking on intense workloads, stopping at nothing for his career. In the years coming, he works double time. Winning an Academy Award for Capote changed things. Hollywood started looking at him differently. You started seeing him pop up in Mission Impossible movies, he would be in Charlie Wilson's War opposite Tom Hanks. These are movies that gave him interesting characters to really sink his teeth into. He plays everything from a maverick CIA agent to a drag queen to a priest. For Philip Seymour Hoffman, it wasn't about the $250 million budget that a film may have, or not. It was always about the character. As we've seen with Hoffman before, he is diving into his scripts with great intensity. It's clear to everybody around him that he is a workaholic, and he will stop at nothing to achieve the perfect performance. Hoffman's schedule is pounding, and it's wearing him down. With three kids in the house, he can't concentrate on his work. He feels he needs time alone to work on his lines and performances. To concentrate better on his work, he takes an apartment around the corner from his home, so that he can really just dive into his roles. Many professionals get an office space to work, but they don't necessarily sleep there. If Philip Seymour Hoffman were my patient and there was a lot of stress going on, and he was in an emotionally vulnerable place, I would want to know, is this really to work, or is this because you're isolating, because you're dealing with demons? June 2011, Philip Seymour Hoffman begins filming The Master. I actually noticed a different intensity, meaning he really understood the gravity of the job that he was taking, so he was very willing to get more involved with it. And he wanted to give me the script to read, and I said, 'You can't give me the script 'unless you just come downstairs and work with everybody else.' And he marched down the stairs to the dungeon-like space that I use for my class, and he worked with everybody else. One of the things that makes him a great actor is that it appeared fairly effortless, but you can see that his technique had grown. He's now a leading actor in film. It's an absolutely beautiful performance. Hot off his fourth Oscar nomination for The Master, Philip increases his workload again by joining the cast of the blockbuster franchise 'The Hunger Games'. When 'The Hunger Games' came along, it came at the end of a very long run of an awful lot of work. Making movies like The Hunger Games is very technical. There's a lot of stuff happening around you that doesn't encourage organic acting. It wasn't his style of film - he gave it his all, but apparently wasn't very happy while he was making these movies. At the same time, Philip dives into a Broadway play that would truly test his resolve ` Willie Loman in Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman.' For Philip Seymour Hoffman, the chance of playing Willie Loman in this great American play, on Broadway, to really put your stamp on it, was irresistible. I would think that it was something that he may have long dreamed of doing. And so when you get his chance to do it, you grab at that. That role is so demanding on such an emotional level, and someone like Philip Seymour Hoffman will stop at nothing to give a great performance time and time again. You know, when you work on a role like Willie Loman, you have a long distance to travel. Playing Willie Loman, for him, was very difficult. He would cry at the end of every show. But, every day, at 8pm, you have to do it again. You're doing it sometimes twice a day. You have a lot of real issues to deal with to enliven this man. I don't think you play a great role like that and don't have personal reflection. It's a very difficult life, especially if you're an actor who really believes in really inhabiting the character. It's no surprise to hear him say, once he finished the play, that he was gonna stay away from theatre for a while. Philip fails to win the Tony Award for Death of a Salesman, and is also seen more dishevelled in public. Sober for 23 years, it's at this time that Philip takes a step back in his recovery. It's pretty evident after this play that he's looking quite frayed, and even his friends would say that he's not quite the same. It's here that he tells a friend that he's never taken a drink in his adult life, and I think he's trying to convince himself that it's okay to drink. Rarely do people who have had a problem with alcohol in the past go back to safe use of alcohol. You can, but it would be unusual. If you're using expressions like 'can handle it', that makes me worry. I would wonder 'why are you so relaxed about this?' You need a little more of an informed decision than just, 'You know what, let's throw the dice and see what happens.' It's Hoffman's first stumble with his sobriety since his college years. It starts with just one drink. But Hoffman misjudges his ability to cut himself off. After 23 clean years, Philip is in relapse. It's a state that another actor would soon find himself in. Like Hoffman, Cory Monteith will be found dead and alone. * By looking at the influences in a star's life, we see why it sometimes ends in tragedy. Cory Monteith will get clean for his love of acting ` just as Philip Seymour Hoffman did. But when bad influences reappear, both men will relapse with a vengeance. Philip Seymour Hoffman, near the end of his life, was an extremely busy actor. In 2012, 2013, it seemed like everything was going extremely well for him. There was an Oscar nomination, he was making film after film after film, he was doing theatre in New York. When you have great material coming your way, it must be hard to say 'no'. Under the influence of his demanding set life, Philip has slipped back into substance abuse. He works his way up to a cocktail of prescription drugs, which include muscle relaxants, anti-anxiety medication for ADHD, high blood pressure, and ironically enough, also for drug addiction. This tells me that he had a lot of symptoms that he was trying to manage. Philip starts hanging out with a different crowd ` one that includes Robert Vineberg. Robert Vineberg is a musician, born in Canada, moved to New York. Mr Vineberg met Mr Hoffman about a year before Mr Hoffman's death. They shared common interests, one of which was using heroin. Sober for decades, Philip relapses with a vengeance. In May of 2013, Hoffman starts to snort heroin. And within a week, he checks himself into rehab. Between his theatre and film obligations, Philip Seymour Hoffman checks into an East Coast rehab for a ten-day stay. You could get the acute detox from heroin over with in ten days. Your brain doesn't really get normal again for at least another six months to two years. So you're still not bringing your A-game after you've detoxed, even though the acute detox symptoms are over. His risk of relapse would've been extremely, extremely high. He immediately goes on to shooting the third Hunger Games. As soon as filming starts, it's evident that he is back full force, using heroin once again. Philip Seymour Hoffman was forgetting people's names, seemed like he was unwell. Things weren't going extremely well for him. Philip's partner, Mimi O'Donnell, tries tough love, and asks Philip to leave the family home in December 2013. If I had a patient whose wife came in to me and said, 'This is what's going on,' what I would say was, 'Is he ready to go to treatment?' And if he's not, the only decision you can make is what are you ready to put up with around your house and your kids. With a full-blown addiction problem and living alone in New York, Philip spends more and more time in the Lower East Side with known drug addicts. There is, like, a fraternity aspect to sharing drugs or sharing heroin. Because heroin addicts need to take drugs to avoid withdrawal and dependency, you get your drug buddies and your drug buddies use drugs with you, and there is a social aspect to that. Philip Seymour Hoffman would've surrounded himself by those people because he wouldn't have to look into their faces and see their disgust and disappointment. Many people who have had a relapse are feeling so disgusted and ashamed with themselves that they can't stand the idea of anyone that they value seeing them like that. Hoffman's private battle with relapse becomes very public at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2014. This is the first time that we really see Hoffman dishevelled. He's getting into altercations with cameramen. When stopped by a reporter who doesn't recognize him because he's wearing a hat and asks him who he is, Philip Seymour Hoffman replies, 'I'm a heroin addict.' When Hoffman returns to New York, the behaviour continues. On February 1st, 2014, Mr Hoffman met with an individual at an ATM. Mr Hoffman had gone to the ATM to obtain funds to purchase heroin from his supplier at the time. February 2nd of 2014, Hoffman is expected to pick up his children from the playground, and he doesn't show up. Philip Seymour Hoffman is found dead in the bathroom of his Greenwich Village apartment. They found him with a syringe needle in his arm and over 50 bags of heroin in his apartment. It didn't seem fair that someone that gifted could be taken in such a wasteful way. When I first heard the news, I was, um, saddened and disappointed. The second thought was that there was going to be a large police investigation, and somebody was likely going to be the target of that investigation. Philip's drug buddy, Robert Vineberg, is arrested on February 4th, along with three other people suspected of selling Hoffman the heroin that killed him. New York City police department believed that they had their man. They were gonna do their job and do it quickly. The evidence showed that the heroin found in the raid on Robert Vineberg's apartment did not match the fatal heroin that Hoffman took. Mr Vineberg did enter into a plea deal. He pled guilty to criminal possession of a controlled substance and he received a sentence of probation of five years and 25 days of community service. To this day, no one has been held responsible for providing Philip Seymour Hoffman with the heroin that took his life. I don't believe that anybody will be arrested or prosecuted in connection with Mr Hoffman's death. Too much time has elapsed. I believe the case is probably closed at this time. Philip faltered at the exact moment when he should have flown. A gifted actor who gave so much of himself to his audience that there just wasn't anything left to fight with. I was angry and very sad. Angry, of course, for what happened with Phil and his family. And angry as a teacher because of the loss of what we could've gotten from him as an actor. Philip Seymour Hoffman battled bad influences throughout his life. Be it compulsive tendencies and drug addiction, an insatiable appetite for more that drove him to a workaholic life, or a destructive relapse surrounded by enabling drug buddies. Philip Seymour Hoffman was a once in a generation talent who paid the ultimate price. Another actor's life follows the same sad and shadowed path. Like Hoffman, Cory Monteith also suffers a relapse. Both men go to rehab and both die within months of treatment. Cory's clean for over a decade, but bad influences find their way back. Cory Monteith was born between the Rocky Mountains and the great prairies in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I'd interviewed Cory Monteith a couple of times, and I found him disarmingly candid. He was someone who was appealing in his wholesomeness. By Hollywood definitions, Cory was a latecomer to acting, landing his breakout role at age 27 on the smash show Glee. He played Finn Hudson. He was naive, but not stupid. He was good-looking, he was a quarterback. He was also a member of the Glee club, which was at the very, sort of, heart and soul of the show Glee. Cory was extremely ambitious and extremely hard-working and driven. You could just tell every take, he was giving it 100%. Though he projected a clean-cut image, Cory struggled with drug addiction as a teenager, having overdosed at just 15 years old. It was a hard, hard story to hear. And I still to this day don't understand how and why, especially to someone like him. Cory Monteith did find sobriety in his adult years, and maintained that for a decade before relapsing in 2013. It's terrifyingly easy for someone to relapse. On July 13, 2013, Cory Monteith was found dead in a Vancouver hotel room of a heroin overdose. At age 31, to have him pass away simply didn't make sense. Cory's young fans were blindsided by the news of his death and the details of how it happened. A decade of sobriety lost in one needle. How did the loveable TV star end up dead of a drug overdose? The clues can be found at the start of his life. Cory was very, you know, reserved. He really didn't explain his past to us at first. It wasn't like he was an open book. You couldn't envision him having issues growing up. Cory Monteith was a military brat, and also a gifted student. His world is thrown into chaos when his father leaves the family. When Cory Monteith was just seven, his parents split up, and it was an acrimonious divorce, and he didn't, then, speak to his father for almost 17 years. Often when there is a separation that happens, or dissolution of the family, children blame themselves. I do wonder if this happened with Cory, and that could look like, 'Oh, maybe my dad didn't love me.' Cory and his older brother are raised by their mother in Victoria, British Columbia. Lacking a father figure, Monteith rebels. The fact that Cory's father was in the military, but his father could have a militant personality ` so one that is regimented, likes structure, likes his son to be clean-cut in a certain way. And it's interesting, because when his father leaves, you see him probably do every single thing that his father told him not to. Under the influence of an absentee father, at age 13, Cory starts to rebel by ditching school and experimenting with drugs. Cory's admitted several times in several different interviews that, when it came to substance abuse, he would do anything, any time, it didn't really matter when or where. Cory was confused as to why his father had left, and I think was trying to find answers. He had a very strange relationship with his family. At 15 years old, Cory suffers a medical emergency and is rushed to the hospital. It's a code blue. A code blue is like everything you see on emergency TV shows. It means that a person has stopped breathing and their heart has stopped working. It sounds like, in Cory Monteith's case, there was an overdose. Cory survives his overdose. In an effort to get him some serious help with his problems, Cory's sent to at least a dozen different high schools, some with alternative programs designed for troubled teens. And the reports of some of these schools at the time were that these kids in these schools were treated very badly. It would have given him the message that treatment is not a safe place. It also would've given him the message that he's a failure, and that it's hopeless. I feel, no doubt at all, that there would've been these tough conversations about, 'All right, we've really tried to meet you halfway here. We've sent you to treatment. 'So when are you gonna make it happen?' He doesn't know why he's not making it happen. He's not supposed to know, he's a kid. 'Well, I might as well not even do treatment. There's no hope for me. I just keep disappointing everybody.' And these are exactly the feelings that make people lead to relapse in the first place. Cory Monteith has been under the influence of drugs and alcohol since he was 13. He's in and out of schools with programs for troubled teens, but nothing is working. The system is failing him. What happens if you take a child who is suffering, and then you put him in a dysfunctional environment that's even worse, that's abusive and confining, a little bit like incarceration, this just underlies his belief, particularly that he feels worthless. Nothing was a good experience. No school he went in, he really felt like he fit in. The high school system failed Cory, and he drops out of school for good at age 16. Cory spends more time on the drug-addled streets of East Vancouver, and starts stealing to pay for his growing drug habit. It is very costly to have a drug problem. It is, in and of itself, a full-time job, because you're waking up and you're not feeling right. So the first thing you're doing is finding a way to get money, so that you can find someone to get something, so that you can feel normal and get through your day. Worried that her son is going to die, Cory's mother stages an intervention, and checks him into rehab when he's 19 years old. But a very common teenage rehab environment technique was what was called the, you know, shark bait. One kid is put in the middle of his peers and they all kind of tell him all the ways that he screwed up. All the character defects that they see about him, and how you're selfish, and how you're weak, and how, 'Yeah, it's all about you, isn't it? 'Have you thought about what your parents are going through?' That would've been extremely common. He goes to rehab, comes out, and he goes back almost immediately to his old ways. And in fact stole what he called a significant amount of money from a relative to buy drugs with. Cory Monteith is out of control, left to his own devices after dozens of failed attempts at treatment. So he gets caught, and the confrontation that followed was the thing that gave him that wake up call that he really needed to straighten his life out. Cory finally commits to recovery. He moves in with a sober family friend and starts learning how to live a life without substances. I think that was his rock bottom. We don't always know what it's gonna look like for people, but there was something about that that woke him up. Everything has to line up, and it did for Cory. At age 20, Cory tags along to a friend's acting class. The teacher allows him to take a few lessons for free. For the first time in years, Cory finds a new interest ` acting. I think acting really represented a turning point for him, and gave him something that even rehab couldn't give him ` it gave him something to live for. For someone like Cory Monteith, who finally found something that connected with him, that really made him feel that he was worth something. Like, 'Wow, I'm actually kind of special. There's some goodness about me.' Clean and focused, Cory starts booking some small TV roles, including the MTV series, 'Kaya'. In 2009, he auditions for a new show called 'Glee'. For his audition, Cory Monteith sent in a videotape of himself with some pencils and he was banging on some Tupperware. The producers saw it and they said, 'Well, we're looking for singers, but he's a good-looking guy. We'll see if we can get him down here. 'We're not gonna fly him in, though. If he wants to come, he's in Vancouver, he can drive down.' Cory Monteith drives for 20 hours to get there, practicing singing, listening to 'Rent' and other things over and over in the car, and you have to imagine that he's up against Broadway singers, every kid in Los Angeles who's ever been in a musical ` the quality of talent is probably extraordinarily high. But I think that didn't matter, because you look at him and you sense something real there. Cory lands the coveted role as Finn Hudson on Glee. The show is a runaway success. So imagine being Cory Monteith, and going from having virtually no career to being the star of a television show that wins in 2009 the SAG Best Ensemble of the Year award, a show that placed more hit singles consecutively on the Billboard charts than the Beatles or the Rolling Stones ` I don't think that anyone, particularly Cory Monteith, could have imagined how his life would change. Glee brings Cory fame, money, and recognition, but also love. In a case of life imitating art, Lea Michele and Cory Monteith were boyfriend and girlfriend on Glee, and off-screen as well, and that, I think, was something that fans really loved about them and the show. Instant fame brings temptations, but with seven years sobriety under his belt, Cory manages to stay away from drugs and alcohol ` at least for now. So people are not offering him alcohol, because they've already told himself, 'Cory's the guy that doesn't drink. He's not much of a partier.' That all helped him stay clean. I believe Cory was able to stay strong and keep away from the temptations of, well, the world in general, but in Hollywood. He knew how much he had to lose. He knew what the cost would be if he went back into that world. But Cory is now so closely connected to his Glee character Finn Hudson, he worries about how that will impact his career. When you are in something that is such a juggernaut as Glee was, when you're on something that is living at the very centre of popular culture, and you are the star of the show, I think you have a very huge danger of being typecast. He did feel like he was already being typecast as the Finn character. So he absolutely wanted to broaden the roles he was playing. He had booked Monte Carlo, Sisters and Brothers, and I think was probably really looking towards a film career. To break away from typecasting, Cory starts to look for darker roles. In Mechanic, Cory Monteith played a street heroin addict, which I think probably must've been fairly close to the bone for him. It's a life that he had actually lived. He was excited cause it was dark, and it was something that he himself could pull from his past experiences to play. I worry that Cory taking on that darker role gave him access to that part of him that possibly he suppressed, but he had to tap into that in that role, and then as a result, that does filter into his real life eventually. At a party, Cory is seen smoking and drinking. This may be the beginning of his relapse. I went to his house, and` I'll never forget it ` it was the last time I saw him, and he had smoked a cigarette, and I'd never seen Cory ever touch a cigarette. It was weird, it took me by surprise. The clients that I do have that suffer from addictions, they do often try to convince me, or convince themselves, that, 'It's just one drink, Nicole. Like, what's the big deal? 'I want to be able to have moderation, I want to be able to enjoy the party.' Think about it for Cory ` he is an A-list Hollywood star, probably not letting loose like the rest of them. I can imagine that gets to him. To Lea Michelle, executive producer Ryan Murphy, and others at Glee, it becomes clear that Cory has fallen off the wagon. Cast members had noticed that Cory had been drinking, there was drug paraphernalia scattered around. He had grown distant in that last year. You got that he was busy, so you kind of just thought, 'Ok, that's why.' Looking back on it now, maybe those were more warning signs than I thought. Some of the relapses are very big. They're very hard to get out of, and you don't ask for help, and you don't want to tell anyone, because all these people have been believing in you, and now you've ruined it. So there's this idea of, 'Well, now that I'm back in the sewer, 'I might as well just stay in the sewer.' Executive producer Ryan Murphy calls Cory to his office. Ryan Murphy said, 'You have to go to rehab.' Cory Monteith, though, said, 'I want to finish the season, 'I have to finish the season,' and Ryan Murphy, to his credit, did the right thing and said, 'It's just a stupid TV show. You go, and I will guarantee you a place when you come back.' I think it's always hard for someone to deal with that, you know, that they're having to walk away from something they love so much to deal with an issue. But it was great that the Glee family was willing to take care of Cory. To keep up appearances, they just wrote his character out of the last two episodes of that season, so it wouldn't be as abrupt a departure. With support from the cast and producers of Glee, Cory Monteith leaves the show to seek help for his drug addiction. He promises to come back sober, but Finn Hudson will never return to William McKinley High. . Did you realise that the average New Zealand home produces around 8 litres of moisture a day? Over a year, it's the equivalent of two of these. Damp homes are harder to heat, and they're bad for our health. So air out your home by opening windows and doors regularly to let fresh air circulate, use externally vented fans in bathrooms, kitchens and laundries and dry clothes outside when you can. Remember ` As a teenager, Cory Monteith was under the influence of a crippling addiction to heroin, and a systemic fail at getting him the right treatment. A passion for acting helped him stay clean and sober for almost a decade, but when those same influences jeopardized the role that made him famous, his world begins to fall apart. The stress of being involved on a giant hit television show can almost be insurmountable sometimes. And I think Ryan Murphy understood that he had to send Cory Monteith away for a short while to get his head back together. With the support of his Glee family, Cory completes a 30-day rehab stay in the spring of 2013. With his relapse behind him, Cory still has a long way to go to stay on the straight and narrow path. Much of recovery and sobriety is really about learning how to have a relationship with suffering and with discomfort and with emotions without having to modulate them in any way. However, in recovery, people don't know how much they need to maintain, and it's really a daily struggle. It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. On July 6, 2013, after travelling with his girlfriend Lea Michelle, Cory heads to Vancouver alone. And here he's returning to the belly of the beast, if you will. I'm pretty sure the rehab facility that he just left likely told him, 'don't go back there'. .003 seconds is how long it takes for a trigger to happen. So it's 'bam,' it's instant. There are conflicting and confusing reports about what exactly it was that happened in the last few days of Cory Monteith's life. The day before he died, he took a dinner meeting with Project Limelight. Project Limelight was a charity that gave back to underprivileged Vancouver children to help them get an arts education. By all accounts, he was clean, he was sober, and this is all we know about his last hours. He's seen leaving his hotel with three friends, he goes to the Portside Pub, where, apparently, he didn't even have a drink. Being in the East side of Vancouver ` a place where he would associate old, negative patterns, drug-using patterns, it's temptation. He was way too close to temptation. It would've been a major trigger. Cory Monteith is fresh out of rehab and on his own in a city with temptations everywhere. The more famous you get, the more people you're surrounded by who never say 'no' to you. There's an expression in recovery ` change your playground, change your playmates. I can imagine that there's a huge pressure, if you're Cory Monteith, to seem like you're doing great, and not to admit that 'Geez, you know, I'm really feeling very triggered right now. 'I'm really feeling unsafe.' For Cory, Vancouver is the place of his addiction. He found drugs on the streets then, and he knows where to find them now. Our brain learns by association. When it comes to Cory, this was an association for him. Like, his brain associated, 'OK, Vancouver means drug use, and just letting go, and freedom, 'or whatever comes, escape', with that drug use. Cravings can go away, but you have to have a safety plan. Think of someone who has a seizure disorder ` sometimes they can tell they're gonna have a seizure. And so they know what to do, right? They go, 'Well, I better sit down, I'm gonna have a seizure.' They know, stay away from flashing lights, there's a whole plan. We don't necessarily give people in recovery those kind of tools. It's believed that Cory scored drugs and went back to his hotel room alone. It could've been as simple as he ran into someone he used to know. I have a lot of patients who say they have to leave town because there's 'too many handshakes'. They go down the street and they're running into too many people who they know. The little demon that comes out and says, 'Maybe I could just, you know, just do a little hit.' Late that night, Cory returned to the hotel alone. He's going up the elevator, he's got this paraphernalia. There's many moments where he could've said, 'I'm not gonna do this.' Cory Monteith being fresh out of rehab would've had much reduced tolerance to heroin. The next afternoon, Cory fails to check out on time. A maid enters his room. She finds Cory Monteith dead on the floor. Investigators find a spoon and a needle. Cory Monteith died of a heroin and alcohol toxicity. He probably told himself, 'OK, you know, I'll just try once, and it'll just be the same amount that I've tried before.' It ended up killing him. Cory's young fans are shocked at the news. They flock to the site of his death to mourn a talent taken too soon. I had interviewed Cory Monteith not long before he passed away. I had in my mind this image of this vital young man that I'd just met. He was an upbeat guy who was looking forward to the future. Again, it didn't seem real. Glee paid tribute to Cory in an emotional episode titled 'The Quarterback', dealing with the death of his character. Cast mates felt they lost two people ` Cory and Finn. I think it was, um, disbelief at first that it... denial, I guess, that it had happened, and then... It's obviously still not the easiest thing to talk about.. But, uh,... first it was denial, then I was, um, then I was mad. One of the hardest things, too, that it's been hard to accept over the years is that he was alone when he... when he passed away. And maybe if he wasn't, maybe if one of us was there, someone that he was very close to was there that night, I don't think this would've happened. A sweet but lost boy, Cory Monteith was under the influence of a father who abandoned him, and a treatment system that failed him. Acting brought salvation, but trapped him in a role in opposition to his true self. Ultimately, his own history repeated in Vancouver ` the city of his addictions, and the scene of his death. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Cory Monteith both go through the cycle of addiction, rehab, and ultimately, relapse, to die alone. They both lost the plot, and ended up under the influence. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air.