Actress Irma P. Hall, whose 30-year acting career includes many different roles on screen, stage and television, spoke Thursday, Nov. 7 in Yeager Recital Hall.
Hall is currently performing in Greensboro with Elon adjunct professor of performing arts Chip Johnson in the Triad Stage production of “A Lesson Before Dying.” Some of her most notable credits include the film and television series “Soul Food,” “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” “Patch Adams,” “Bad Company,” and the HBO film version of “A Lesson Before Dying.”
Johnson asked Hall about her life and career, and she later answered questions from and gave advice to the students in attendance.
Hall grew up with a passion for music and drama, especially after her family moved to Chicago, one of America’s black cultural centers. During this time, she was always more interested with the characters in films than the actors who played them. “I was not in love with Lawrence Olivier, I was in love with Hamlet,” she said.
Her interest in acting turned into a career which has included roles with actors such as Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones. “It doesn’t matter who I’m working with, (the public) knows their name,” she said. “When it comes to me, they know my character’s name.”
Hall lived a whole other life before she began acting full-time at the age of 60. She was a school teacher for more than twenty years, during which time she was also a publicist for her school on the Dallas Express, a black weekly paper in Dallas. She was also the paper’s sports editor in the 1970s, making her one of the country’s first female sports editors.
She came into acting when, while on assignment publicizing a film, a director heard her reading poetry and cast her in a role. From that time on, she has enjoyed representing the black women who had an influence on her early years. “I consider it to be an honor to be the voice of black women who have had no voice.”