Irma P. Hall was born in Beaumont, Texas.  In 1972, Raymond St. Jacques was in Texas to produce and star in his film “BOOK OF NUMBERS”.  Irma worked as interim publicist for the movie, and when Mr. St. Jacques chanced to hear her reciting one of her poems, he asked her to audition for a part in the film.  Irma (then a 36-year-old teacher and single mother of two) got the role as “Georgia Brown”, and that was the “Sweet” launch to Irma’s starting her “Second Career” in acting.

 

In 1978, Irma appeared as Tilly the Housekeeper in the TV series DALLAS and in director Ron Howard’s telefilm Skyward.  Howard also cast her again, years later, in Backdraft.  In 1996, Irma won the Chicago Film Critics Award as “Best Supporting Actress” for her performance in A Family Thing (with James Earl Jones and Robert Duvall).  Two years later, she won the NAACP Image Award for “Best Supporting Actress” for her 1998 work as Big Mamma Jo in Soul Food, and was nominated for another Image Award in 2001 when she reprised her role in the Showtime TV series based on that film. 

 

Since then, Irma has appeared in more than 50 theatrical and TV films and guest appearances including:  Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil, Nothing To Lose, Patch Adams, Beloved, A Lesson Before Dying, Something to Sing About, Collateral, the Coen Brothers’ The Ladykillers with Tom Hanks (earning her a Special Jury Award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival).

 

Irma has been honored as a Black History Maker by the Du Sable Museum in Chicago,  and had a street named after here there.  She has been inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame in Austin, Texas, into the Spindletop Film Hall of Fame in her hometown of Beaumont and honored by the Chicago Int’l Film Festival as well as the Chicago and Dallas chapters of Women in Film. Irma is a member of the National Association of Negro Women and is a proud mother and grandmother.