Irma P. Hall, the actress who played Big Mama in Soul Food and went toe to toe with Tom Hanks in The Ladykillers, has died. She was 91. Hall died Tuesday, November 10, in Dallas, and her family announced the news the next day. No cause of death was shared.

Hanks added his voice on Friday. The actor posted a photo of his former co-star on Instagram and called her "a sheer joy," TheGrio reported.

The two shared the screen in the Coen brothers' 2004 comedy The Ladykillers. Hall played Marva Munson, a churchgoing landlady who has no idea the polite professor renting her room is planning a heist. She stole the movie from him, and the Cannes Film Festival agreed, handing her a Jury Prize for the performance.

A Teacher First

Acting was her second career. Born Irma Dolores Player on June 3, 1935, in Beaumont, Texas, she grew up in Chicago and came back to Texas for college. Then she spent more than two decades teaching English and foreign languages in Dallas public schools.

Her break came by accident. Actor and director Raymond St. Jacques heard her recite poetry in Dallas and put her in his 1973 film Book of Numbers. She kept teaching and kept taking roles, and she helped establish the Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre along the way. By the 1980s, acting was the full-time job.

Her daughter, Irma Hall Crayton, told the Associated Press that her mother began in a classroom and ended up being "a teacher to the world."

Big Mama, Forever

Hall was 60 when A Family Thing gave her a major film role in 1996, playing the blind Aunt T. opposite James Earl Jones and Robert Duvall. A year later came the part people still call her by.

As Josephine "Big Mama" Joseph in Soul Food, she was the reason the family showed up for Sunday dinner. The role won her an NAACP Image Award, and she returned to it for the television series that followed. TV Insider notes that her performance inspired the Boyz II Men song "A Song for Mama."

The credits kept coming: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Beloved, Patch Adams, Collateral and Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns. She even voiced Great Aunt T. in the Rugrats Kwanzaa special.

A serious car crash sidelined her just before The Ladykillers opened. Hall later said that Hanks and the Coens signed a pillow for her while she recovered, and that she hugged it whenever she missed them.

At home in Dallas, she was a Church Mother at Inspiring Body of Christ Church, where she read to children at the church's school.

Her family has said memorial arrangements will be announced at a later date.