Irma P. Hall, a teacher turned actress who hit her stride in her 60s, embracing a matriarchal presence in scene-stealing turns in \u201cSoul Food\u201d and \u201cThe Ladykillers,\u201d died on Tuesday in Dallas. She was 91.<\/p>\n
Her daughter, Irma Hall Crayton, confirmed her death in a statement.<\/p>\n
Ms. Hall did not start acting professionally until she reached her mid-30s, and it would take another 20 years for her to land her big break. Her age set her up to be cast in older, motherly roles. But she never gave in to stereotypes and made each character she played her own.<\/p>\n
In an acting career that lasted nearly 50 years, Ms. Hall worked in theater and small television roles before landing the part of Aunt T., a blind woman who guides two half brothers, played by James Earl Jones and Robert Duvall, in \u201cA Family Thing\u201d (1996).<\/p>\n
In many ways, it was a part she had spent a lifetime preparing to play.<\/p>\n
\u201cI spent a lot of time with my grandmothers,\u201d Ms. Hall told The New York Times shortly after the film was released. \u201cThey told me stories. My mother\u2019s mother taught me to count to 100 by sitting outside and counting the stars. I was very close to my aunts, my mother. I got a little bit of Aunt T.\u2019s determination, no-nonsense attitude and mischievousness from each of those women.\u201d<\/p>\n
Irma Dolores Player was born on June 3, 1935, in Beaumont, Texas, the only child of Samuel Player V, a traveling saxophone player, and Josephine Thomas Player, a nurse\u2019s aide. She moved to Chicago at 7 when her father got a steady job at the Rhumboogie Caf\u00e9, a nightclub owned by the boxer Joe Louis. She fell in love with show business watching her father rehearse after school, and seeing Black stars like Lena Horne and Fats Waller onscreen in South Side movie palaces.<\/p>\n
Ms. Hall attended a South Side parochial school, where she showed an early talent for the arts. A nun once sent her to the principal\u2019s office for drawing nudes. (She later said she was trying to draw from memory an image she had seen at the Art Institute of Chicago.)<\/p>\n
\u201cMy family was middle class in name only,\u201d she told The Times in the 1996 interview. \u201cWe had education and taste but no money.\u201d<\/p>\n
After high school, she attended Briar Cliff College (now Briar Cliff University), an all-women\u2019s college in Sioux City, Iowa. The school\u2019s drama department was staging a production of Gian Carlo Menotti\u2019s \u201cAmahl and the Night Visitors,\u201d and they needed someone to play a Black wise man.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere weren\u2019t but seven Black women at the college,\u201d she told The Times, \u201cso I got drafted.\u201d<\/p>\n
She later transferred to Texas College and married her college sweetheart, Shed Hall. They divorced in 1968. She is survived by Ms. Crayton and three grandchildren. A son, Shed Hall Jr., died in 2002.<\/p>\n
Before Ms. Hall began acting professionally, she was a teacher for more than two decades, teaching English and foreign languages in the Dallas public schools. Some classes were held in segregated one-room schools.<\/p>\n
In 1971, Ms. Hall was participating in a poetry reading where she met the actor Raymond St. Jaques<\/a>, who was in Dallas to film \u201cA Book of Numbers.\u201d He offered her a role in the film. She started auditioning for bigger roles soon after, and mostly worked in theater in Chicago and Dallas, and on television.<\/p>\n Success eventually came for Ms. Hall, who was 61 when she played Aunt T. in \u201cA Family Thing.\u201d Reviewing the film for The Times, the critic Stephen Holden wrote<\/a> that she played the \u201csalty, wisecracking octogenarian\u201d with \u201csuch zest and heart\u201d that \u201cshe nearly steals the movie from its two stars.\u201d<\/p>\n That \u201czest and heart\u201d would become her trademark approach to roles like Mother Joe in \u201cSoul Food<\/a>\u201d (1997), opposite Vivica A. Fox (Ms. Hall reprised the role in a television spinoff), and Marva Munson in \u201cThe Ladykillers<\/a>\u201d (2004) opposite Tom Hanks. Times critics praised her for the \u201cgusto\u201d she brought to both roles.<\/p>\n Ms. Hall won outstanding supporting actress for \u201cSoul Food\u201d at the NAACP Image Awards, and the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival for her turn in \u201cThe Ladykillers,\u201d which was written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.<\/p>\n Other notable roles included Minerva, a spiritualist and root doctor, in \u201cMidnight in the Garden of Good and Evil\u201d (1997) and the hospitalized mother of a cabdriver played by Jamie Foxx in \u201cCollateral\u201d (2004).<\/p>\n Earlier in her career, she helped establish the Dallas Minority Repertory Theater, and she was a longtime church mother at Inspiring Body of Christ Church in Dallas. Its current pastor, Rickie G. Rush, is one of Ms. Hall\u2019s former students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Irma P. Hall, a teacher turned actress who hit her stride in her 60s, embracing a matriarchal presence…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":915860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[259952,198006,175677,382680,88,92166,6265,382679,382683,17452,120877,382677,382681,23498,53670,29366,382682,206,411,23876,382678],"class_list":["post-915859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-actors-and-actresses","tag-coen","tag-deaths-obituaries","tag-duvall","tag-entertainment","tag-ethan","tag-fox","tag-foxx","tag-gian-carlo","tag-hall","tag-hanks","tag-irma-p","tag-james-earl","tag-jamie","tag-joel","tag-jones","tag-menotti","tag-movies","tag-robert","tag-tom","tag-vivica-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=915859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/915860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=915859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=915859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=915859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}