Star of Boogie Nights and Magnolia was best known for fleeting Seinfeld role
Philip Baker Hall’s air of ruefulness and scowling impatience elevated even the briefest of appearances into masterful portrayals of gravity and silliness, best captured in an unforgettable role on Seinfeld as a hardcore library cop.
With his raspy delivery, grizzled hair and doleful face, Hall excelled as government and military officials with urgent agendas as well as Hollywood and business executives with ulterior motives. He played enough judges to form a bar association, but the hint of menace in his voice also made him effective as oldschool hoods and others on the fringes of society.
When choosing roles, he once said, he was drawn to
‘‘really off-centre parts that are so ludicrous that you almost can’t believe them. It’s always fun to take those kinds of parts and play them with as much serious passion as you can muster’’.
One of his most indelible characters was the aptly named library investigations officer Lieutenant Bookman on Seinfeld. Larry David, who created the show with comedian Jerry Seinfeld, once said Hall never played his scenes for laughs, which only intensified the bonkers absurdity of punchlines such as, ‘‘I’ve got a flash for you, joy boy!’’
Although his television and film appearances were often too fleeting to merit mention in reviews, Hall became one of the most reliable and welcome character actors of his era. Film scholar David Thomson described him as having a ‘‘wonderfully sour presence’’. Thomson added, ‘‘He looks like a guy on the subway, at the end of the diner counter, a face that knows its place is in the crowd and several rows back’’. Yet that veneer of anonymity propelled one of the busiest late-blooming careers in show business.
Hall did not start acting professionally until he was 30 but made up for lost time with hundreds of roles, from the works of Shakespeare to those of Arthur Miller, with regional theatres across the United States.
He came to greater prominence in 1983 as the star of the off-broadway drama Secret Honor, a one-man show focused on the postpresidential life of Richard M. Nixon. Hall copied neither Nixon’s voice nor his mannerisms but New York Times cultural critic Mel Gussow wrote that he ‘‘seems to capture a full measure of the man – his edginess, suspicion, resentment and unconscious humour – as he wills himself into failure’’.
Robert Altman directed a screen version of the play in 1984, but it tanked commercially, relegating Hall to another decade of minor parts on both sides of the law, among them a mob boss fixer in Midnight Run (1988) and an Inland Revenue agent in Say Anything (1989).
In the early 1990s, Paul Thomas Anderson offered Hall the lead role of a gambler in a short film he was planning. The project,
Cigarettes & Coffee, featuring an interconnected series of stories set in a diner, became a hit at the Sundance Film Festival and launched Anderson’s feature career.
The writer-director went on to give Hall some of his most memorable dramatic opportunities: a rare leading role as a mysterious professional gambler with a guilty past and a deep sense of honour in Hard Eight (1996), a commercially-minded theatre magnate who foresees the future of videotape in the pornographic film industry in Boogie Nights (1997), and a quiz show presenter who faces his mortality in Magnolia (1999).
Hall’s trio of high-profile roles for Anderson, along with his Seinfeld appearance, were his windfall. He was the harried police captain in Rush Hour (1998) and its action-comedy sequels and the embattled 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt in the tobacco whistleblowing drama The Insider (1999).
He was as much at home in Lars von Trier’s scathing minimalist avantgarde drama Dogville (2003) as he was in his prolific supporting parts in major studio releases of the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, among them Air Force One, The Contender, The Truman Show, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Argo.
Philip Baker Hall was born in
Toledo to a factory labourer who had difficulty finding work during the
Great Depression. At a young age, Hall began performing magic shows at lodge meetings and banquet functions.
He majored in speech and drama at the University of Toledo, where he worked as a ditchdigger to pay for his education. After graduating in 1953, then army service, he supported himself and a growing family as a teacher in Ohio before tiring of the ‘‘hypocrisy and bureaucracy’’ of academic life. He uprooted his wife and children to New York and was quickly exposed to the vagaries of professional show business.
He married and divorced twice, and is survived by his third wife, Holly Wolfle, and four daughters.
Hall periodically returned to the stage, notably in a 2000 London and offbroadway revival of David Mamet’s
American Buffalo opposite William H. Macy. But he mostly stayed close to Hollywood, remaining in seemingly constant demand for guest appearances on shows such as 3rd Rock From the Sun, Boston Legal and Modern Family.
By Hall’s telling, he was bemused to find that his years of compelling dramatic work onstage, as Prospero or Willy Loman, had been almost entirely overshadowed by a few minutes as a flinty library detective. ‘‘I’m not putting it down. It’s just that when people say, ‘I loved you as Bookman’, I can’t help but think, ‘But what about the other 280 roles
I’ve done?’ I don’t say it, though. Because with Bookman, I kind of hit the jackpot.’’ – Washington Post