Irma P. Hall, a teacher turned actress who hit her stride in her 60s, embracing a matriarchal presence in scene-stealing turns in “Soul Food” and “The Ladykillers,” died on Tuesday in Dallas. She was 91.
Her daughter, Irma Hall Crayton, confirmed her death in a statement.
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.
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 “A Family Thing” (1996).
In many ways, it was a part she had spent a lifetime preparing to play.
“I spent a lot of time with my grandmothers,” Ms. Hall told The New York Times shortly after the film was released. “They told me stories. My mother’s 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.’s determination, no-nonsense attitude and mischievousness from each of those women.”
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’s aide. She moved to Chicago at 7 when her father got a steady job at the Rhumboogie Café, 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.
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’s 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.)
“My family was middle class in name only,” she told The Times in the 1996 interview. “We had education and taste but no money.”
After high school, she attended Briar Cliff College (now Briar Cliff University), an all-women’s college in Sioux City, Iowa. The school’s drama department was staging a production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” and they needed someone to play a Black wise man.
“There weren’t but seven Black women at the college,” she told The Times, “so I got drafted.”
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.
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.
In 1971, Ms. Hall was participating in a poetry reading where she met the actor Raymond St. Jaques, who was in Dallas to film “A Book of Numbers.” 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.
Success eventually came for Ms. Hall, who was 61 when she played Aunt T. in “A Family Thing.” Reviewing the film for The Times, the critic Stephen Holden wrote that she played the “salty, wisecracking octogenarian” with “such zest and heart” that “she nearly steals the movie from its two stars.”
That “zest and heart” would become her trademark approach to roles like Mother Joe in “Soul Food” (1997), opposite Vivica A. Fox (Ms. Hall reprised the role in a television spinoff), and Marva Munson in “The Ladykillers” (2004) opposite Tom Hanks. Times critics praised her for the “gusto” she brought to both roles.
Ms. Hall won outstanding supporting actress for “Soul Food” at the NAACP Image Awards, and the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival for her turn in “The Ladykillers,” which was written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.
Other notable roles included Minerva, a spiritualist and root doctor, in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (1997) and the hospitalized mother of a cabdriver played by Jamie Foxx in “Collateral” (2004).
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’s former students.
