Long before fans stopped her on the street, Hall spent more than two decades teaching Texas students, and one of them grew up to be her pastor.
By EEW Magazine Online Editors
Irma P. Hall, who played Big Mama in the 1997 film “Soul Food,” attends the premiere of Tyler Perry’s “Meet the Browns” at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood on March 13, 2008. Hall died Nov. 10, 2026, in Dallas. She was 91.
For a generation of Black families, the hardest scene in "Soul Food" unfolds in a Chicago hospital room. Josephine "Big Mama" Joseph has kept her three grown daughters and their families at one Sunday table for 40 years. Now she lies in a coma after suffering a stroke during surgery to amputate her leg. She wakes just long enough to speak to her grandson Ahmad, and then she is gone.
Irma P. Hall, the actress who made that goodbye ache in living rooms across the country, died Tuesday, Nov. 10, in Dallas. She was 91.
Her family announced the death Wednesday in a statement calling her "a beloved actress, author, poet, educator and public speaker whose contributions touched countless lives throughout her remarkable career." No cause of death was given.
Hall won the 1998 NAACP Image Award for outstanding supporting actress in a motion picture for the 1997 film, written and directed by George Tillman Jr. She later reprised the role on Showtime's "Soul Food" series.
She understood what the character meant to people. "People stop me in Chicago, I'm Big Mama," she said in a 2008 interview.
Brandon Hammond, who played Ahmad, was 12 when they met. He has said she "immediately treated [him] like her grandson." Hammond reunited with Hall in Texas a few years ago while directing a "Soul Food" reunion documentary. To mark her 90th birthday in June 2025, he shared photos of the two of them talking, hugging and sitting down to a soul food dinner together.
Irma P. Hall as Josephine “Big Mama” Joseph and Brandon Hammond as Ahmad in 1997’s “Soul Food.”
Fame came late to Hall, and it never stopped surprising her. Born Irma Dolores Player on June 3, 1935, in Beaumont, Texas, she moved with her family to Chicago's South Side in 1942. Her father was a big-band saxophonist.
After graduating from Texas College in Tyler in 1956, she taught English and foreign languages, including French and Spanish, in Houston and Dallas for more than two decades. She also reported for The Dallas Express, a weekly newspaper serving Black readers. "When I was doing something important like teaching school, nobody came to ask for my autograph," she once said. Years into her film career, she still wondered at the fans who asked. "I'm still saying, 'For what?'"
Her film career began unexpectedly. Actor and director Raymond St. Jacques saw her recite poetry in Dallas and cast her in his 1973 film "Book of Numbers." A year earlier, she had helped found the Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre, where she worked as an administrator and performer and wrote "Gentle Fire," a play drawn from her poetry. She kept her day job until 1984, then turned to acting full time.
The roles grew. She played Tilly, the Ewing family housekeeper, on "Dallas" in 1978 and appeared in "Backdraft" and "Mo' Money." Her breakout came as Aunt T, opposite Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones, in 1996's "A Family Thing," which drew recognition from the Chicago and Kansas City film critics associations. "Soul Food" followed, along with "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," "Beloved," "Patch Adams," "Collateral" and Tyler Perry's "Meet the Browns."
In 2004, Hall played Marva Munson, a churchgoing landlady who rents a room to Tom Hanks' character in the Coen brothers' "The Ladykillers." The performance earned her a Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
She was still recovering at the time from a January 2004 car accident in a Chicago snowstorm, which required open-heart surgery to repair a punctured aorta. In 2005, Joel and Ethan Coen introduced her at her induction into the Texas Film Hall of Fame.
Away from the cameras, Hall was a longtime member and Church Mother at Inspiring Body of Christ Church in Dallas, where senior pastor Rickie G. Rush was once her student. Hall was his speech teacher when he was 14, Rush recalled, and she told him then, "One day, you will be my pastor."
Irma P. Hall poses for a portrait during the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 7, 2008. (Credit: Jeff Vespa/WireImage/Illustration by EEW Magazine Online)
She read to children at the church's University of Dreams school and stayed active in its theater ministry, according to the Dallas Weekly. Texas College awarded her an honorary doctorate in fine arts and education in a ceremony held at the church. Rush said she "has taken her final bow on the stage of life and stepped into eternity."
Her name already lives on in North Texas theater. Hall also helped establish the African American Repertory Theatre in DeSoto, Texas, and in 2015 DFW Black Arts founded the Irma P. Hall Black Theatre Awards, known as the Irmas.
Hall had a son, a daughter and four grandchildren. The family said it would share funeral and memorial arrangements at a later date and asked for privacy.
Her daughter and namesake, Irma Hall Crayton, said her mother "started as a teacher in the classroom but ended up being a teacher to the world."
