Irma P. Hall, Actress in ‘Soul Food’ and ‘The Ladykillers,’ Dies at 91

Irma P. Hall, the late-blooming actress known for portraying no-nonsense matriarchs in Soul Food and the Coen brothers’ adaptation of The Ladykillers, has died. She was 91.

Hall died Tuesday, her family announced, calling her “a beloved actress, author, poet, educator and public speaker whose contributions touched countless lives throughout her remarkable career. Her legacy of talent, dedication and compassion will continue to inspire generations to come.”

A Texas native and longtime Chicago resident, Hall spent 27 years as a schoolteacher and worked as an actress for more than two decades before she first garnered national attention for playing the feisty Aunt T. in A Family Thing (1996), starring Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones as blood brothers.

She also was a preacher in Daniel Petrie’s Square Dance (1987), a nurse in Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991), a voodoo priestess in Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) and the domineering mother of Jamie Foxx’s character in Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004).

More recently, she made an impression as the wise, pie-making neighbor Meemaw on the Sundance TV series Hap and Leonard.

Hall is probably best known for portraying Mama Joe, whose Sunday night dinners were a family tradition, in Soul Food (1997) and then on the Showtime series that was based on the film written and directed by George Tillman Jr.

“People stop me in Chicago, I’m Big Mama,” Hall, who won an NAACP Image Award for her work in the movie, said in a 2008 interview. “Down in the Loop, they’ll see me across the street: ‘Hey, Big Mama, how you doing? Can I have a hug?’ ‘Yeah, baby, come on.’ I get lots of hugs and things.”

Hall received a special jury award at Cannes for her performance as Marva Munson, the cantankerous, churchgoing woman in Mississippi who rents a room to the crook Goldthwait Higginson Dorr III (Tom Hanks), in The Ladykillers (2004).

Irma Dolores Player Hall was born on June 3, 1935, in Beaumont, Texas, and raised in Chicago. Her father was a saxophonist who played with big bands, and her mother was a housekeeper.

She graduated from Texas College in Tyler, Texas, then moved to Dallas to become an English and foreign-language teacher. During breaks, she also worked as a reporter for The Dallas Express, a weekly newspaper that focused on African Americans.

While a teacher, Hall also co-founded The Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre, where she served as an administrator and performed. At age 36, while reciting a poem during a production, she was discovered and cast in Book of Numbers, a 1973 film for Embassy Pictures. Hall ventured out as an actress but continued to keep her day job.

In 1978, she appeared as the Ewings’ housekeeper, Tilly, on CBS’ Dallas and in the next two years on telefilms featuring the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Finally, she quit teaching to work full-time as an actor.

She went on to be seen in other films including Toni Morrison‘s Beloved (1998), Patch Adams (1998), A Slipping-Down Life (1999), Bad Company (2002), Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns (2008) and Jayne Mansfield’s Car (2012).

In January 2004, Hall was involved in a serious car accident during a snowstorm in Chicago, and she required open-heart surgery to repair a punctured aorta. The next year, she was inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame in Austin, introduced by Joel and Ethan Coen.

“It’s surprising when people come up and they want my autograph,” she once said. “I’m still saying, ‘For what?’ When I was doing something important like teaching school, nobody came to ask for my autograph.”