The schoolteacher who became Soul Food’s Big Mama Jo: Irma P. Hall dies at 91

Irma P. Hall, the Texas schoolteacher who became one of American film’s most recognisable grandmothers, has died at 91.

Her family confirmed the death in a statement on Wednesday, saying she died on Tuesday in Dallas surrounded by loved ones. They said her legacy of “talent, dedication, and compassion” would inspire generations to come. No cause of death was given, and the family asked for privacy, with funeral arrangements to be announced later.

Who was she before Hollywood?

Born Irma Dolores Player in Beaumont, Texas, on 3 June 1935, Hall grew up in Chicago and returned to Texas to study at Texas College in Tyler. She then spent more than two decades teaching English and foreign languages in Dallas public schools.

Acting found her almost by accident. The actor and director Raymond St. Jacques saw her at a poetry reading in Dallas and cast her in his 1973 film Book of Numbers. The same year she helped found the Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre, and she kept working on stage as her screen career grew.

Why does Soul Food still matter?

Soul Food, released in 1997, followed three sisters in Chicago and the mother whose weekly Sunday dinners kept them together. Hall’s Big Mama Jo was the film’s anchor, and her illness and death drive the family’s unravelling. The role won her the NAACP Image Award for outstanding supporting actress in a motion picture, and she returned to the character in the television adaptation.

Her family said the Boyz II Men ballad A Song for Mama, written and produced by Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds for the film, was built around her character, and that it became a lasting Mother’s Day anthem.

What else will people remember her for?

For an actor who had started in her late thirties, the late 1990s were a busy run. She played Aunt T opposite Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones in A Family Thing (1996), then appeared in Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), Beloved and Patch Adams (both 1998).

In 2004 she starred opposite Tom Hanks in The Ladykillers, the Coen brothers’ remake of the 1955 Ealing comedy, as the churchgoing widow whose house a gang of crooks plans to use for a casino robbery. The performance earned her a Jury Prize at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. The same year she appeared in Michael Mann’s Collateral, and she later worked in Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns (2008) and on television series including Touched by an Angel and Chicago Fire.

She was inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame, and in 2015 the Irma P. Hall Black Theatre Awards, known as “the Irmas”, were founded in her name in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to honour Black theatre artists.

What did her family say?

Hall was a longtime church mother at Inspiring Body of Christ Church in Dallas, where she read to children at the church’s school. Her daughter, Irma Hall Crayton, said her mother “started as a teacher in the classroom but ended up being a teacher to the world.”

She is survived by her daughter.