Irma P. Hall, the former Dallas schoolteacher who became one of Hollywood's most beloved screen matriarchs as Big Mama in Soul Food, died Tuesday, Nov. 10, in Dallas. She was 91.
Her family announced the death Wednesday and gave no cause, The Associated Press reported. Her daughter, Irma Hall Crayton, said her mother "started as a teacher in the classroom but ended up being a teacher to the world."
From the classroom to Cannes
Born Irma Dolores Player on June 3, 1935, in Beaumont, Texas, Hall grew up in Chicago and returned to Texas for college. She spent more than two decades teaching English and foreign languages in Dallas public schools and helped establish the Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre.
Acting found her by accident. Actor and director Raymond St. Jacques heard her recite poetry in Dallas and cast her in his 1973 film Book of Numbers. She kept teaching while taking roles and turned to acting full time in the 1980s.
Her breakthrough came at 60 in A Family Thing, where she played Aunt T., the blind woman who guides half-brothers played by James Earl Jones and Robert Duvall. In 1997's Soul Food, she played Big Mama, the force holding a Chicago family together, a role that earned her an NAACP Image Award and that she brought back in the TV series based on the film.
In 2004 she starred opposite Tom Hanks as landlady Marva Munson in the Coen brothers' The Ladykillers, a performance that won a Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize. Her credits also include Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Beloved, Patch Adams, Collateral and Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns.
Off screen, Hall was a longtime Church Mother at Inspiring Body of Christ Church in Dallas, where she read to children and stayed active in the theater ministry.
Her death comes days after the passing of another Black screen favorite, '227' star Toukie Smith.
