Philip Baker Hall, Character Actor in Roles of Authority, Dies at 90
He appeared in “Secret Honor,” “Boogie Nights,” “Seinfeld” and dozens of other movies and television shows.
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” (1984). 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.”
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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 (1999) — famous for a torrential rainstorm of frogs — as a dying, mentally unraveling game-show host. In “Boogie Nights” (1997), he played a budget-conscious porn-theater magnate. And he was the star of “Hard Eight” (1996), 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” (2000); Don Hewitt, the “60 Minutes” producer, in “The Insider” (1999); and the C.I.A. director Stansfield Turner in “Argo” (2012). 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.”
The raspy voice, the resigned posture, the world-weary eyes with heavy bags and the thatch of hair that gradually turned white magnified a gravitas that made Mr. Hall’s characters believable, even when audiences knew better. In “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999), playing the detective hired by a wealthy man to investigate his son’s murder, he seems sure of his conclusion that the younger man had committed suicide, unaware that he’s sharing that finding with the real killer.
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Mr. Hall had become a Hollywood hot property in his late 60s.
Philip Baker Hall was born on Sept. 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.
Mr. Hall had small roles in international touring productions with the American Repertory Company, a cultural exchange program. And he joined a Boston group affiliated with the Second City improv troupe. “I began to find myself as an actor” there, he recalled in a 2000 Playbill interview, not because comedy was necessarily his calling but because improvisation required so much “energy and enthusiasm.”
His New York theater experience included Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” Steve Tesich’s “Gorky” (the title role) and a 2000 revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo.” Although he did extensive stage work in Los Angeles, he never appeared on Broadway.
It sometimes seemed that Mr. Hall had appeared on every series of his day. A small sampling of his credits include “Bob,” “BoJack Horseman,” “Cagney & Lacey,” “Cheers,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Empty Nest,” “Falcon Crest,” “Family Ties,” “Good Times,” “L.A. Law,” “Madam Secretary,” “M*A*S*H,” “Matlock,” “Miami Vice,” “Modern Family,” “Monk,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “The Waltons” and “The West Wing.”
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His talents were in demand at varying levels of sophistication, from “Rush Hour” (1998), with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, to Lars von Trier’s artily abstract “Dogville” (2003), alongside Nicole Kidman and Lauren Bacall, with the likes of Charles Busch’s campy “Die, Mommie, Die!” (2003) in between.
In his final film, “The Last Word” (2017), he was the ex-husband of a retired executive (Shirley MacLaine) determined to control her own obituary. In his last television role, he again played a man pondering his sins — a retired C.I.A. asset — on Netflix’s “Messiah” (2020).
Mr. Hall’s marriages to Mary-Ella Holst and Dianne Lewis ended in divorce. He married Holly Wolfle in 1981. In addition to his daughter Anna, from his third marriage, he is survived by his wife; another daughter from that marriage, Adella Violet Hall; two daughters from his marriage to Ms. Holst, Trisha Infante and Darcy Hall; a brother, Lee; and four grandchildren.
Co-stars admired his creative process; William H. Macy called it “a glorious mystery.” Larry David saw Mr. Hall’s gift for laughter as much simpler: “He just acts like he’s not in a comedy.” When reviews began referring to “the great Philip Baker Hall,” Mr. Hall just shrugged and said, “It’s because of my age.”
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