Film
Fame of Hall
She’s spent two decades as an able but anonymous character actress. Now, with the release of Beloved, Irma P. Hall is ready for her close-up.
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It was the right decision. She received the Joseph Jefferson Award for Supporting Actress 1988 for a part she played in a Chicago Theatre Company production, the Chicago Film Critics’ award for best supporting actress for her work in A Family Thing in 1997, and this year the Women in Film and Television Achievement Award for general excellence and the NAACP Image Awards Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Soul Food. Her honors going back to 1975 number nearly three dozen.
In Soul Food, Hall played Big Mama, a matriarch whose family’s world falls apart when, in the middle of the film, she dies. Told through the eyes and voice of nine-year-old Ahmad, played by Brandon Hammond, the story examines the complicated relationships Big Mama’s three adult daughters have with one another, their spouses, and their children. That her character disappears yet remains central to the movie is a tribute to Hall’s craft. “I didn’t have to do a lot of preparation for the role,” she says. “I knew I was Brandon’s grandmother. I knew I was the mother to these three daughters. When I first saw Brandon, I fell in love with him. He was my grandson. And the other actresses were my daughters.” It’s this sort of immersion that makes Hall thoroughly believable in all her roles—even to herself. “When I saw Soul Food, I cried when my character died,” she admits.
The list of characters Hall has brought to life is as long as a July afternoon in Texas. People will stop her on the street and in the subway and call out “Big Mama” or “Aunt T,” a reference to the part she played in A Family Thing, with Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones. “The ironic aspect of Irma P. Hall playing Aunt T is that she was not the first choice,” says Jones. “But fate brought her to us anyway, and she overwhelmed us with her ability to sustain those long narratives and transform herself physically and chronologically into the character. She was Aunt T.” Adds Duvall simply: “Irma is a joy to work with.”
Similar to Big Mama, the character of Aunt T also called for Hall to play a feisty older woman who makes sure that a fragile family holds together. Though blind and 88 years old, Aunt T misses nothing as she works hard to soothe the tensions between Duvall’s and Jones’s characters after the one played by Duvall discovers that they are half brothers who were separated sixty years before.
While those roles were easy fits for Hall, others have required serious research. The image of Hall as Minerva, the voodoo priestess, bookends Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, appearing in the film’s opening and closing shots. “With Minerva, I got books on voodoo,” Hall says. “I had been interested in it since I was a teenager. I knew it was the American version of the African Yoruba religion, that it wasn’t witchcraft, and it always annoyed me that whenever I saw anything that had to do with voodoo, it was portrayed as spooky, as devil worship. I wanted to make a clear distinction between when Minerva was practicing good and when she was practicing evil.”
Hall also found out as much as she could about the real Minerva. “I don’t want to do anything to embarrass a person when I’m playing a character who is real,” she says. Both Minerva and Aunt T were cited as scene-stealers by critics. “Actually, that really disconcerted me with A Family Thing,” Hall says, laughing. “I apologized to Robert Duvall when he told me, saying I didn’t mean to upstage anyone. I’m a theater person, and in theater, upstaging is a negative thing.
“Raymond St. Jacques asked me what I wanted from this business when I started,” she explains. “I said I want to be a female Lon Chaney, Sr. You don’t think of him—of what he really looked like. When people say ‘Irma P. Hall,’ I want one of my characters to pop into their minds. I want my characters to be that real. Acting is all about telling the truth. I want to tell the absolute truth when I’m doing a character.”
In Beloved Hall’s portrayal of Ella tells the truth. “I was so thrilled to get the part,” she says. “I can’t wait to see the film.” After that, she’ll appear as Clotelia, the housekeeper, in the film adaptation of Anne Tyler’s A Slipping-Down Life, shot this past summer in Austin and due to be released next year. In Patch Adams, a Christmas-release comedy-drama starring Robin Williams as an unconventional doctor whose methods are questioned by his colleagues and admired by his patients, she plays the head nurse in a hospital.
Talking about her role in Patch Adams prompts a discussion of Hall’s thoughts on race and the continuing lack of steady, solid black female characters in the movies. “It just takes a while for things to change,” she says, no anger in her voice. “Black people do not control the purse strings in Hollywood, and blacks make up twelve percent of the population, so they think that black people’s stories won’t sell. But Soul Food crossed over the day it came out. I’m just happy to be the voice of the older woman. A lot of women can identify with me as the caretaker of some kind—there are certain roles that transcend race. I think the industry will see that one day and say color doesn’t matter. Everyone has grandmothers or mothers. And nurses come in all colors.”
Which is not to say that Hall isn’t eager to play black-specific roles. It’s her dream to one day play Mary McLeod Bethune. “It’s amazing to me that people don’t know who she is,” she says. “Bethune was the founder of Bethune-Cookman College [in Daytona Beach, Florida]. Her parents were slaves. She was the first one in her family to get any education. She built this school and had nine teenagers as students at first. She went on to advise presidents. She was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. She was my idol. I even got to meet her when I was a child.”
Hall sounds awed; she sounds, in fact, like her many fans when they speak about her. But again, when told how much she is admired, this great actress laughs off the praise. “Whatever this phenomenon is,” she says, “I just hope God guides me and keeps it going.” Yes, ma’am.
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