Irma P. Hall, Dallas Theatre Co-Founder and the Matriarch of 'Soul Food,' Dies at 91
Irma P. Hall taught school in rural Texas for 27 years before Hollywood ever called — then she co-founded the Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre, played Big Mama Jo in 'Soul Food,' and built a nearly five-decade career that Dallas–Fort Worth still honors every year with theatre awards that carry her name. She died Tuesday in Dallas, her family confirmed Wednesday. She was 91.
DALLAS — Irma P. Hall, the veteran actress known for films including "Soul Food" and "The Ladykillers," died on Tuesday, Nov. 10, in Dallas, her family confirmed in a statement shared on Facebook on Wednesday, Nov. 11. She was 91. "Her legacy of talent, dedication, and compassion will continue to inspire generations to come," the family statement read, thanking fans, friends and colleagues for an outpouring of love and support, and asking for privacy. Details of a memorial service will be announced later.
Dallas is where her stage life began. In 1973 — the same year she made her film debut in Raymond St. Jacques's crime drama "Book of Numbers" — Hall co-founded the Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre with actor Reginald Montgomery and performed on its stage. In 1978 she appeared on CBS's "Dallas" playing housekeeper Tilly. The city's debt to her is now permanent: the Irma P. Hall Black Theatre Awards, known as The Irmas, were founded in 2015 and honor artistic excellence across the Dallas–Fort Worth area every year.
Acting was her second career, and she never treated the first as lesser. Born Irma Dolores Player on June 3, 1935, in Beaumont, Texas — her father a saxophone player, her mother a hospital administrator — Hall grew up in Chicago and returned to Texas to attend Texas College. She then taught high school students in rural Texas for 27 years, often in one-room schools before the desegregation of public schools. "I didn't know I wanted to [act], but God knew, and he didn't tell me until late," she told Entertainment Weekly in 1996. Of the autograph-seekers who came later, she once said, according to The Hollywood Reporter: "I'm still saying, 'For what?' When I was doing something important like teaching school, nobody came to ask for my autograph."
The screen career that followed ran nearly five decades: "Soul Food" (1997), where she played Big Mama Jo, "Beloved" (1998), "Patch Adams" (1998), "A Family Thing," "A Slipping-Down Life" (1999), "Bad Company" (2002), "The Ladykillers," "Collateral" and "Meet the Browns" (2008) among them. In 2004 she was hospitalized after a car crash during a Chicago snowstorm and underwent open-heart surgery to repair a punctured aorta; the following year, the Texas Film Hall of Fame in Austin inducted her. She described her Beaumont childhood to Texas Monthly in 1998 as "shockingly beautiful" — surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents, in a house where, she said, people were always teaching her poems and quoting Shakespeare. Hall is survived by her daughter, Irma Hall Crayton.
