Irma P. Hall, Scene-Stealing Matriarch of 'Soul Food' and 'The Ladykillers', Dies at 91

Irma P. Hall, the teacher turned actress who became one of Hollywood's most reliable matriarchs, died on Tuesday in Dallas. She was 91. Her daughter, Irma Hall Crayton, confirmed the death in a statement.

Hall did not act professionally until her mid-30s, and waited another 20 years for her big break. When it came, she was 61, playing Aunt T., a blind woman who guides two half brothers, played by James Earl Jones and Robert Duvall, in "A Family Thing" (1996). Reviewing the film for The New York Times, 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."

She nearly stole several more.

What made her career so unusual?

Most actors peak in their 30s. Hall peaked in her 60s, arriving on screen fully formed as Mother Joe in "Soul Food" (1997), opposite Vivica A. Fox, and as Marva Munson in "The Ladykillers" (2004), opposite Tom Hanks. The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, wrote and directed the latter. Times critics praised the "gusto" she brought to both roles.

Her age typed her in motherly parts. She never gave in to stereotypes and made each character her own.

The honors followed. She won outstanding supporting actress for "Soul Food" at the NAACP Image Awards and took the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival for "The Ladykillers" — a rare distinction for a character actress who had spent decades teaching English and foreign languages in Dallas public schools, some of them segregated one-room schools.

Where did Aunt T. come from?

In many ways, the part was a lifetime in the making.

"I spent a lot of time with my grandmothers," Hall told The New York Times shortly after the film's release. "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."

She reprised Mother Joe in a television spinoff of "Soul Food". 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).

What shaped her?

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 took a steady job at the Rhumboogie Café, a nightclub owned by the boxer Joe Louis. She fell for show business watching him rehearse after school, and seeing Black stars like Lena Horne and Fats Waller onscreen in South Side movie palaces.

A nun at her parochial school once sent her to the principal's office for drawing nudes — she said she was recreating an image from memory that she had seen at the Art Institute of Chicago.

"My family was middle class in name only," she told The Times in 1996. "We had education and taste but no money."

At Briar Cliff College in Sioux City, Iowa, she was drafted into Gian Carlo Menotti's opera "Amahl and the Night Visitors" because, as she put it, "there weren't but seven Black women at the college." She later transferred to Texas College and married her college sweetheart, Shed Hall. They divorced in 1968.

Her screen career began almost by accident. In 1971, at a Dallas poetry reading, she met the actor Raymond St. Jaques, who was filming "A Book of Numbers" and offered her a role. She spent the next two decades in theater in Chicago and Dallas — she helped found the Dallas Minority Repertory Theater — and in small television parts before "A Family Thing" changed everything at 61.

She is survived by her daughter, Irma Hall Crayton, and three grandchildren. A son, Shed Hall Jr., died in 2002. She remained a longtime church mother at Inspiring Body of Christ Church in Dallas, whose current pastor, Rickie G. Rush, is one of her former students — proof that Hall never really stopped teaching.