Veteran actress Irma P. Hall played the family matriarch, Mother Joe, whose Sunday night dinners of soul food are a family tradition in the motion picture Soul Food and in the Showtime series of the same name. She also recently appeared in HBO’s critically acclaimed A Lesson Before Dying, with Don Cheadle, Cicely Tyson, and Mekhi Phifer. Among her other film credits are Buddy, Beloved, Patch Adams, and the 1997 comedy Nothing to Lose.

Hall became a film actress late in life, and completely by surprise. A graduate of Texas College, and a teacher for 27 years, she was reciting a poem at a Dallas gathering of artists and writers when a producer asked her to audition for a role in a film. Hall was 36 and a divorced mother of two when she got a small role in Book of Numbers thirty-one years ago.

She won The Chicago Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as the lovable Aunt T in the film A Family Thing, which starred James Earl Jones and Robert Duvall. In 1998 she won a NAACP Image Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in the film Soul Food and was honored again in 2001 with an Image Award nomination for her work on the series Soul Food.