Actor Irma P. Hall, the former educator who pivoted to acting in her late 30s to star in films including “Soul Food,” “The Ladykillers” and “Meet the Browns,” has died. She was 91.
Hall died Tuesday in Dallas surrounded by her loved ones, her family announced Wednesday in a statement. Her family said the actor leaves behind a “remarkable legacy” that spans from her memorable characters on screen, her time as a teacher early in life and her role as a church leader in Dallas in her final years. A cause of death was not revealed.
“She started as a teacher in the classroom but ended up being a teacher to the world,” Hall’s daughter Irma Hall Crayton said in the statement. “My mom used to always say, ‘To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.’ And she was just that to many people.”
Hall, who was born in Texas and raised in Chicago, is best known to film fans for portraying scene-stealing, elderly types. She was Big Mama, the matriarch of the central Joseph family, in George Tillman Jr.’s 1997 “Soul Food,” starring Vanessa Williams, Vivica A. Fox and Nia Long as her three daughters. That same year she shared the screen with Kevin Spacey and John Cusack as witchy healer Minerva in Clint Eastwood’s Savannah-set “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” In the Coen brothers’ “The Ladykillers,” Hall was the religious and aging widow who rents a spare room to a deceiving “professor” (Tom Hanks) and his band of criminals posing as musicians (Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons, Tzi Ma and Ryan Hurst).
She earned numerous accolades for her work, including an NAACP Image Award for her work in “Soul Food” and a jury prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival for “The Ladykillers.”
“I’ve always found older women extremely interesting. In fact, as a child I’d be playing outside and when they couldn’t find me, they’d just start knocking at all the old people’s doors,” Hall recalled to The Times in 1996. “My mother used to say I was probably the only child that was born wanting to be old.”
Hall’s acting career spanned from the mid 1970s to the 2010s and also included roles in the 1998 film adaptation of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” starring Oprah Winfrey, 1996’s “A Family Thing” with James Earl Jones and Robert Duvall, the TV series “Hap and Leonard” alongside “The Wire” star Michael K. Williams and Tyler Perry’s “Meet the Browns.”
She sharpened her ability to play older in TV, film and theater by channeling the women in her life and studying elders’ behavior, she told The Times in 1996. She made it a habit to visit nursing homes, speak with their residents and study their physicality from their gestures to their gaits.
“I practice little things like that all the time because I love to play old people and I don’t ever want them to be embarrassed or ridiculed by my performance,” she recalled at the time.
Irma Dolores Player was born June 3, 1935, in Beaumont, Texas. Her father was a saxophonist during the big-band era and her mother was a housekeeper. She returned to Texas for college, graduating from Texas College in Tyler. She remained in her birth state to work as a teacher in poor, segregated schools before her unexpected pivot to acting in her late 30s. She taught foreign languages and ultimately taught theater.
Actor-director Raymond St. Jacques discovered Hall after hearing her read poetry and cast her in his 1973 film “Book of Numbers,” paving the way for a decades-long career that would endear her to generations of TV and film audiences.
“I want to tell their stories so profoundly that no one will ever forget these characters,” she told the Dallas Morning News of her characters in 2017. “I don’t care if they don’t know who Irma P. Hall is.”
Hall later lived in Chicago, where she cared for her parents and pursued an award-winning theater career. She also dedicated her efforts toward nurturing upcoming talent in her home state, co-founding the Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre, and served as a longtime member of and church mother at Inspiring Body of Christ Church in Dallas.
Hall’s survivors include her daughter. A celebration of life will be announced at a later date.
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