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To many, Hall was instantly recognizable for one of the most powerfully funny guest appearances on “Seinfeld.” In the 22nd episode of the sitcom in 1991, Hall played Lt. There’s no one else with a face like that, or a voice like that.” “I have a particular fascination with character actors, with wanting to turn them into lead actors,” Anderson told The Los Angeles Times in 1998. In one indelible scene, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s first with Anderson, a hot-shot gambler chides Hall as “old-timer.”Īnderson would cast Hall again as adult film theater magnate Floyd Gondolli who warns Burt Reynolds’ pornography producer about the industry’s future in “Boogie Nights.” In Anderson’s “Magnolia,” Hall played Jimmy Gator, the host of a kids game show. In it, Hall played a wise and courteous itinerate gambler named Sydney who schools a young drifter (John C. It was staggering.”Īfter the $20,000 short made it into the Sundance Film Festival, Anderson expanded it into his feature debut, 1997’s “Hard Eight,” which catapulted Hall’s career. Certainly, as a film, I’d never really seen anything like it. “I mean, it was just so brilliant, resonating with nuance all over the place, like a playwright. “I’m reading this script, and I truly had trouble believing that that kid wrote this script,” Hall told the AV Club in 2012. Anderson, believing Hall hadn’t gotten his due in film, asked him to look at a script he had written for a 20-minute short film titled “Cigarettes & Coffee.” The two would hang out, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee between scenes. Hall then encountered a production assistant in his early 20s named Paul Thomas Anderson. That changed when he was shooting a PBS program in 1992. Hall made an impression in the smallest of roles in other films, like 1988’s “Midnight Run.” But outside of theater, Hall was mostly doing guest roles in television. Critic Pauline Kael wrote that Hall “draws on his lack of a star presence and on an actor’s fears of his own mediocrity in a way that seems to parallel Nixon’s feelings.” There he played Richard Nixon in the one-act play “Secret Honor,” a role he reprised in Robert Altman’s 1984 film adaptation. While shooting bit parts in Hollywood (an episode of “Good Times” was one of his first gigs), Hall worked with the L.A.

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“I had an affinity for playing those roles.”īorn in Toledo, Ohio, Hall initially devoted himself more to theater in Los Angeles, after moving out in 1975, than TV and movies. “Men who are highly stressed, older men, who are at the limit of their tolerance for suffering and stress and pain,” Hall told the Washington Post in 2017.

His range was wide, but Hall, who had a natural gravitas, often played men in suits, trench coats and lab coats. In a career spanning half a century, Hall was a ubiquitous hangdog face whose doleful, weary appearance could shroud a booming intensity and humble sensitivity. Her husband, she added, never retired from acting. “His voice at the end was still just as powerful,” said Wolfle Hall.

She said Hall had been well until a few weeks earlier, and spent his final days in warm spirits, reflecting on his life.

Holly Wolfle Hall, the actor’s wife of nearly 40 years, on Monday said Hall died Sunday surrounded by loved ones in Glendale, California. NEW YORK - Philip Baker Hall, the prolific character actor of film and theater who starred in Paul Thomas Anderson’s first movies and who memorably hunted down a long-overdue library book in “Seinfeld,” has died.

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