Bad news.
Philip Baker Hall, the gravelly-voiced character actor who radiated equal amounts of quiet authority, unshakable confidence and effortless unflappability onscreen for five decades, died on Sunday at his home in Glendale, Calif. He was 90.
The cause was complications of emphysema, his daughter Anna Ruth Hall said.
When Mr. Hall portrayed powerful men, audiences believed. He was Richard M. Nixon reflecting on his sins in Robert Altman’s fictional “Secret Honor”. Roger Ebert’s rave review of the film in The Chicago Sun-Times described Mr. Hall’s performance as one of “such savage intensity, such passion, such venom, such scandal, that we cannot turn away.”
When Mr. Hall played a character’s fierce conviction for laughs, audiences remembered. In a 1991 episode of “Seinfeld,” he was Lieutenant Bookman, a detective working for the New York Public Library pursuing two decades in overdue fines for a copy of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.”
Bookman had been imagined as “a blunt, hard-spoken guy,” like a Raymond Chandler detective, Mr. Hall recalled decades later in an interview with Rolling Stone, and he knew during the audition that he’d nailed it. It was, in fact, “one of the last roles I ever auditioned for, simply because so many doors opened up” afterward.
In a career of more than 80 films and 200 television appearances, he was often cast as men accustomed to being listened to - doctors, lawyers, generals, detectives, cabinet members, priests and way too many judges. “I didn’t want to do any more of them,” he told The Washington Post in 2017, complaining that the roles were sedentary. “You never get to walk around.”
When a premise was outrageous or a character’s behavior over-the-top, filmmakers called Mr. Hall. He was in three of Paul Thomas Anderson’s feature films, including Magnolia - famous for a torrential rainstorm of frogs - as a dying, mentally unraveling game-show host. In “Boogie Nights”, he played a budget-conscious porn-theater magnate. And he was the star of “Hard Eight”, as a preternaturally calm retired professional gambler who is sincerely trying to help an aimless younger man.
Mr. Hall played Aristotle Onassis in the TV movie “Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis”; Don Hewitt, the “60 Minutes” producer, in “The Insider”; and the C.I.A. director Stansfield Turner in “Argo”. But he never sought roles as celebrated men. He had learned the character types that summoned the best of his gifts - “highly stressed older men,” he said in the Washington Post interview, “who are at the limit of their tolerance for suffering and stress and pain.”
Mr. Hall had become a Hollywood hot property in his late 60s.
Philip Baker Hall was born on September 10, 1931, in Toledo, Ohio, the son of William Alexander Hall, a factory worker, and Berdene (McDonald) Hall. He served in the Army, working as a translator in Germany, and attended the University of Toledo. He wanted to be an actor - a college yearbook photo shows him in “The Heiress” - but decided to be practical and pursue teaching. After teaching high school during graduate school, he changed his mind.
Although he was almost 40 when he made his first film (an uncredited role in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point”) and 44 when he did his first television role (a lawyer in a network movie), he worked in theater much earlier. Even “Secret Honor,” the one-man Nixon film, began as a stage script, first performed at the Provincetown Playhouse in Manhattan.
In 1973, Mr. Hall married Dianne Lewis. They divorced in 1976, and he married Holly Wolfle in 1981. In addition to his daughter Anna, from his second marriage, he is survived by his wife; another daughter from that marriage, Adella Violet Hall; two daughters from his marriage to Ms. Lewis, Trisha Infante and Darcy Hall; a brother, Lee Hall; and four grandchildren.
Rest in peace, Philip.
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15 сен 2024
