EncourageOneAnother

For twenty-two years she stood in front of high school classrooms in Houston and Dallas teaching French and Spanish. She did not act full time until she was nearly fifty. The world did not know her face until she was sixty. Irma P. Hall died on Tuesday. She was ninety-one. Irma Dolores Player Hall was born in Beaumont, Texas in 1935. She started teaching in 1962 — languages, at Booker T. Washington High School in Houston and then James Madison High School in Dallas — and she kept doing it for more than two decades. She did not leave teaching for acting until 1984. She was forty-nine. Then in 1997 she played Josephine Joseph in Soul Food — Mother Joe, Big Mama, the grandmother holding a family together around a Sunday table — and became, more or less overnight, the grandmother of Black America. She was sixty-two. In 2004 the Coen brothers cast her opposite Tom Hanks in The Ladykillers. She won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for it. And there is something about that year that almost nobody knows. Shortly before that film came out, she was in a head-on crash in a Chicago snowstorm. A broken rib punctured her aorta. She had emergency open-heart surgery. Her ankle was shattered and her arm was broken. She was sixty-eight years old. She recovered, and she went back to work, and she kept working into her eighties. There is a particular thing she did that does not show up in a filmography. She stayed in Dallas. She taught, mentored and worked with young Black actors in that city for decades, and a great many people there will tell you today that she was the first person who told them they could do it. She spent her first career standing in front of children telling them what they were capable of. Then she spent her second one playing the woman who tells you the same thing, to an audience of millions. She was ninety-one, and she was a schoolteacher from Beaumont, Texas.