Actor soared with friendship with Anderson
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. He was 90.
Holly Wolfle Hall, the actor’s wife of nearly 40 years, on Monday said Mr. Hall died Sunday surrounded by loved ones in Glendale, California. She said Mr. Hall had been well until a few weeks earlier and spent his final days in warm spirits, reflecting on his life.
“His voice at the end was still just as powerful,” said Wolfle Hall. Her husband, she added, never retired from acting.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, Mr. Hall initially devoted himself more to theater in Los Angeles, after moving out in 1975, than TV and movies. While shooting bit parts in Hollywood (an episode of “Good Times” was one of his first gigs), Mr. Hall worked with the L.A. Actor Theatre.
His career changed when he was shooting a PBS program in 1992. Mr. Hall then encountered a production assistant in his early 20s named Paul Thomas Anderson. The two would hang out, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee between scenes. Anderson asked Mr. Hall to look at a script he had written for a 20-minute short film titled “Cigarettes & Coffee.”
“I’m reading this script, and I truly had trouble believing that that kid wrote this script,” Hall told the AV Club in 2012. “I mean, it was just so brilliant, resonating with nuance all over the place, like a playwright. Certainly, as a film, I’d never really seen anything like it. It was staggering.”
After the $20,000 short made it into the Sundance Film Festival, Anderson expanded it into his feature debut, 1997’s “Hard Eight,” which catapulted Mr. Hall’s career.
In a memorable 1991 “Seinfeld” episode, Mr. Hall played Lt. Joe Bookman, the library investigator who comes after Seinfeld for a years-overdue copy of “Tropic of Cancer.”