Born to Be Old and a Big Scene Stealer

While most Hollywood actresses will do just about anything to land the young and glamorous roles, what Chicago stage actress Irma P. Hall wants above all is to play old and infirm.

Since becoming an actress full-time at about 40 years old --after a career as a teacher--Hall, 61, has played a steady stream of octo- and nonagenarians. And that’s just the way she likes it.

“I have a friend who’s been in plays with me who says ‘I’m too vain to do what you do’,” Hall says with a big laugh. “But I’ve always found older women extremely interesting. In fact, as a child I’d be playing outside and when they couldn’t find me, they’d just start knocking at all the old people’s doors. My mother used to say I was probably the only child that was born wanting to be old.”

Hall’s latest role as an elderly character is in a “A Family Thing,” which explores the bonds of family and deeply held racial prejudices. The movie stars James Earl Jones and Robert Duvall as men who find out late in life that they are both sons of the same black mother, Willa Mae, who died giving birth to the character played by Duvall. Hall plays Aunt T, Willa Mae’s no-nonsense sister.

With her indomitable will and down-to-earth good sense, Aunt T virtually steals the movie out from under the formidable clutches of screen veterans Jones and Duvall.

She is the film’s emotional center, emphasizing the importance of family ties and the necessity of color blindness. Her actual blindness is a metaphor made all the more powerful when she delivers a key line: ‘I don’t have the blessing of being able to separate people by looking at them anymore.’

“Aunt T is like the guide,” Hall says. “She reminded me of so many women in my life--my mother, my grandmothers, my aunts, other women in the community that had to do with rearing me. She was not afraid to do what she had to do. If something blocked her way, Aunt T would just say, ‘OK, we’ll just go another way.’ ”

Hall is refreshingly self-effacing about her performance, which has elicited kudos from critics nationwide and is clearly the role of her 20-year acting career.

“She’s a scene stealer because she’s easily recognizable,” Hall says. “It was written that way. I just did what the script called for.”

The film was Duvall’s idea initially. He approached screenwriters Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson about writing a script on the subject of a white man who learns as an adult that he is also black. As the film’s unofficial shepherd, Duvall considered Hall’s performance integral to the story.

“She really solidified the movie,” Duvall says. “As a stage actress, she has a purity in her acting, especially compared to many film actors who have bad habits. Her portrayal was very, very real. She delivered the theme of the movie, without hammering the message.”

It was the film’s relative subtlety, while tackling a serious and timely subject, that appealed most to Hall.

“It’s not a big message thing,” Hall says. “But it does show you that what’s really important is family, love, establishing good relationships and maintaining them. I think that’s why people feel good when they see it. Because those are kind of huggy things, but they don’t overpower you. It’s not syrupy with sentiment. It’s like a good hug.”

Hall’s own life has followed those precepts. Born in Texas but raised in Chicago, she returned to Texas while in college to work as a teacher in poor, segregated one-room schools. She has since raised two children and now has four grandchildren. She moved back to Chicago seven years ago to take care of her elderly parents, who have since died. (Hall’s father was a saxophonist during the big-band era.)

Though she has had bit parts in about 20 movies since segueing from teaching to acting, “A Family Thing” amounts to her first significant screen role.

And it is one that she lobbied for, though perhaps not through typical Hollywood channels.

“I always pray,” Hall says. “Every day. I have a habit with something I really want or if I have a problem I can’t solve, I write a little note and put it on my altar table. . . . When I auditioned and read the script I thought, ‘I just want to be in this movie.’ So I went home and I wrote a little note ‘Please, God, if it’s your will, let me get a part.’ I was really wanting Aunt T, but I figured they’d cast that out of New York and use a big star. I never thought I’d get that, I thought, ‘If I have to be a tree, just let me be in there somewhere.’ ”

Initially, Hall was cast, not as a tree, but in the small role of midwife Maotis.

She was called back to read for the bigger part of Aunt T, then flown to Memphis to do a screen test on video before ultimately landing it.

But her prayers still were not fully answered. Hall began her entreaties to a higher authority again--this time on behalf of a good friend, Crystal Laws Green--for the part she had forsaken.

“One day as I was leaving the set, the director Richard Pearce, came up to me and said ‘I have a friend of yours coming in to play Maotis.’ I said, ‘Lord, I put it on the altar’,” Hall says. “He asked why I didn’t just ask him, and I said, ‘I didn’t have to. God told you.’ ”

Just before playing Aunt T, Hall played a 90-year-old great-great grandmother on stage in the Chicago production of “Jar the Floor.” To help her master the mechanics of playing someone of that age, she studied the behavior of elderly women.

“I’d go to nursing homes and just sit down and talk to them and really watch them,” Hall says. “I’ve figured out why old people walk the way they do. They walk widely so they can maintain balance and they take short steps.”

She demonstrates the small gestures that make her portrayals seem so authentic.

“This is another tiny little thing I noticed about old people,” Hall says, picking up a salt shaker during an interview at a Beverly Hills restaurant. “If I just pick this up, you see how my hands are? With an old person their hands are stiff and they pick it up like that.” Her fingers crook as if arthritic. “See? All of a sudden, it’s an old hand. And if it’s really old, you want to add this” and her hand begins to shake.

Says Hall: “I practice little things like that all the time because I love to play old people and I don’t ever want them to be embarrassed or ridiculed by my performance.”