Magnolia & Seinfeld star Philip Baker Hall dies at 90

• Hall died Sunday in Glendale, Calif., surrounded by loved ones.
• He had been in good health until a few weeks ago, his wife said.
• Hall was born in Toledo, Ohio, and lived in Los Angeles after relocating to the U.S. in 1975.

Philip Baker Hall, the renowned cinema and theatrical character actor who acted in Paul Thomas Anderson’s early films and famously tracked down a long-overdue library book in Seinfeld, has died. He was 90 years old.

Hall died Sunday in Glendale, Calif., surrounded by loved ones, according to Holly Wolfle Hall, the actor’s wife of nearly 40 years. Hall had been in good health until a few weeks ago, she claimed, and had spent his final days in good spirits, reflecting on his life.

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“His voice at the end was still just as powerful,” Wolfle Hall remarked. Her husband, she went on to say, never stopped acting.

Hall was a ubiquitous hangdog face with a doleful, weary expression that could conceal a booming intensity and humble sensitivity throughout the course of a half-century career. Hall’s acting range was broad, although he was best known for playing men in suits, trench coats, and lab coats.

“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. “I had an affinity for playing those roles.”

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Philip Baker Hall was born in Toledo, Ohio, and after relocating to Los Angeles in 1975, he focused on theatre rather than TV and film. Hall worked with the L.A. Actor Theatre while shooting little roles in Hollywood (one of his first jobs was on an episode of Good Times).

In the one-act play Secret Honor, he played Richard Nixon, a role he returned in Robert Altman’s 1984 film adaptation. 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.” according to critic Pauline Kael.