PHILIP BAKER HALL
(10 September 1931 – 12 June 2022)
Although he eventually became a successful cinema actor, it took Philip Baker Hall forty years before he made his film debut. Until acting made the call when he was thirty, he worked as a high school teacher and a radio announcer. At first he mainly performed on stage in a career that eventually turned out to be a long and very rewarding one. During his lifetime he worked with many notable filmmakers, from Robert Altman to Cameron Crowe, and John Schlesinger to Peter Weir. In particular, he enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson.
At the age of ninety, Philip Baker Hall has died in California from emphysema. He was born in Toledo, Ohio, to the factory worker William Hall and his wife Alice. After studying at the University of Toledo, he served as a US Army translator in Germany before becoming a school teacher. Always interested in theatre as a child, he had had a magic act and did impressions of Al Jolson. In 1960, he was a replacement in the cast of the long-running musical The Fantasticks in New York. Before further stage work at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, he made an uncredited appearance in his first film, playing the diner owner in Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. Controversially filmed in Death Valley and with music by Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones and Jerry Garcia, among others, the movie flopped, but Philip Baker Hall had finally arrived on film.
Also in 1970 Hall appeared as a priest in Cowards, Simon Nuchtern's drama about draft evasion during the Vietnam war. Another flop, the film was re-edited with sex scenes and re-released as a sexploitation DVD called Love-In '72. Matters improved with Coma (1978), Michael Crichton's hospital drama about serial deaths among the patients. Hall played a doctor, the first of the many authority figures he was apt to be cast as during his career, such as businessmen, executives, detectives, sheriffs, generals, judges, senators, captains, coaches, more priests and beyond, reaching as far as a police commissioner (in Ghostbusters II), the US Attorney General (in Air Force One) and the US Defence Secretary (in The Sum of All Fears).
One figure that Hall managed to pin down was that of ex-president Richard Nixon, a role he had played on stage in Los Angeles in Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone's monodrama Secret Honor. Robert Altman happened to see the production and decided to film it with Hall. The piece is set in Nixon's New Jersey mansion in the late 1970s where, with a bottle of whisky and a gun his only companions, he relates the story of his life – the rise to fame and the ultimate downfall – as he airs his confessions into a tape recorder, surrounded by CCTV cameras. It was probably Hall's greatest achievement as an actor.
Still, he went on to make many more films and television programmes, even if they did not necessarily measure up to Hall's triumph in Secret Honor. However, the work he did for Paul Thomas Anderson certainly did, beginning with the writer-director's short film Cigarettes & Coffee (1993), a tale of the unexpected with a complete scenario about the adventures of a twenty-dollar bill in twenty-four minutes. Anderson expanded the plot for his first feature film, Hard Eight (1996, aka Sydney). Hall plays the gambler Sydney Brown who meets a homeless man (John C. Reilly) who has lost his money in Las Vegas and needs to fund his mother's funeral. Sydney offers to win the money for John, and the fun continues from there onwards.
Boogie Nights (1997) was Anderson's next film, with Burt Reynolds as a porn promoter trying to push his latest discovery, the well-endowed Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg). Hall plays a theatre owner who wants to video the porn star’s act. In 1999 Hall was also in Anderson's Magnolia, a psychological melodrama depicting the lives of many characters on the brink of madness in the San Fernando Valley.
Many films followed, including The Truman Show with Jim Carrey, Rush Hour with Jackie Chan, Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho, Tim Robbins's Cradle Will Rock – about the making of the 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock by Marc Blitzstein – Michael Mann's The Insider, Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley, William Friedkin's Rules of Engagement and Nic Bettauer's Duck, a dystopian view of the future with Philip Baker Hall as a suicidal widower who discovers a lone duck, takes it home to care for it and forgets all about killing himself.
Hall continued to work in the cinema until 2018, all the while also appearing on television in many high profile series (The Waltons, Cagney & Lacey, T.J. Hooker, Benson, L.A. Law, Seinfeld, The Fugitive, The West Wing, Curb Your Enthusiasm, etc).
Philip Baker Hall was married three times, firstly to Dianne Lewis from 1973 to 1976. After their divorce, he married Mary-Ella Holst with whom he has two daughters, Patricia and Darcy. He then married Holly Wolfie with whom he also has two daughters, Adella and Anna.
MICHAEL DARVELL