Irma P. Hall, a teacher turned actress who hit her stride in her 60s, embracing a matriarchal presence in scene-stealing turns in “Soul Food” and “The Ladykillers,” died on Tuesday in Dallas. She was 91.
Her daughter, Irma Hall Crayton, confirmed her death in a statement.
Ms. Hall did not start acting professionally until she reached her mid-30s, and it would take another 20 years for her to land her big break. Her age set her up to be cast in older, motherly roles. But she never gave in to stereotypes and made each character she played her own.
In an acting career that lasted nearly 50 years, Ms. Hall worked in theater and small television roles before landing the part of Aunt T., a blind woman who guides two half brothers, played by James Earl Jones and Robert Duvall, in “A Family Thing” (1996).
In many ways, it was a part she had spent a lifetime preparing to play.
“I spent a lot of time with my grandmothers,” Ms. Hall told The New York Times shortly after the film was released. “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.”
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 got a steady job at the Rhumboogie Café, a nightclub owned by the boxer Joe Louis. She fell in love with show business watching her father rehearse after school, and seeing Black stars like Lena Horne and Fats Waller onscreen in South Side movie palaces.
Ms. Hall attended a South Side parochial school, where she showed an early talent for the arts. A nun once sent her to the principal’s office for drawing nudes. (She later said she was trying to draw from memory an image she had seen at the Art Institute of Chicago.)