The ultimate late-bloomer, Philip Baker Hall is one of the few actors ever to achieve Hollywood stardom after the age of 60. The Ohio-born New York stage actor was nearly 40 when he debuted in "Cowards" (1970), an anti-war picture which made little impact, and it was 1975 before he finally moved to L.A., realizing that "all my friends were in Hollywood." Even there, he worked primarily on the stage, savoring juicy roles in "The Petrified Forest" and the Arthur Miller triumvirate ("All My Sons", "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible"), while paying the bills with unglamorously small roles in film and television. Hall became a recognizable face without a name, giving finely honed portrayals of stern but generally virtuous authority figures, as well as powerful if problematic patriarchs. His visceral portrayal of an emotionally naked Richard Nixon in the provocative one-man stage show "Secret Honor" (1983) garnered him a Drama Desk nomination and caught the eye of director Robert Altman.
Hall reprised his semi-deranged Nixon onscreen in Altman's tour-de-force "Secret Honor" (1984), railing against Alger Hiss, Fidel Castro, Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger, and anyone named Kennedy. Though considered an Oscar contender, too few people saw the film, and instead of using the exposure as a building block for a more prominent film career, he remained content to return to the theater. Still, "Secret Honor" was a major breakthrough as he was now at least a blip on the radar screen. By the end of the decade, he was a prison superintendent in the short-lived drama "Mariah" (ABC, 1987), and a series regular on the primetime soap "Falcon Crest" (CBS, from 1989-90), then returned to the big screen with distinctive character turns: a detective in the off-beat teen comedy "Three O'Clock High" (1987); a bit role as Sidney in the Robert De Niro-Charles Grodin road comedy "Midnight Run" (1988); a no-nonsense IRS man in Cameron Crowe's engaging teen romance "Say Anything" (1989); the NYC Police Commissioner in "Ghostbusters II" (1989); and a judge in the Tom Selleck vehicle, "An Innocent Man" (1989).
Hall made an impression in a 1991 episode of “Seinfeld” (NBC) as Lt. Bookman, the library cop who confronts Jerry about a copy of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" that had been checked out since 1971. But it was his relationship with director Paul Thomas Anderson that propelled his career. The pair met during the making of the 1993 PBS special "Campus Culture Wars: Five Stories About PC", on which Anderson was a production assistant. A fan since "Secret Honor", Anderson wrote a part specifically for Hall for his short film, "Cigarettes and Coffee" (1992), which played at Sundance in 1993 and earned the director the chance to develop the material further through the festival’s workshop. Eventually, "Cigarettes and Coffee" became "Hard Eight" (1996, originally called “Sydney”), starring Hall as an enigmatic professional gambler from Reno who becomes a father figure to a young, down-on-his-luck drifter (John C Reilly). He earned the film's strongest notices with a quiet, melancholy performance, but his co-stars (Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L Jackson) also garnered praise for their ensemble work in the four-character drama. Anderson demonstrated unshakable loyalty to Hall when producers who loved the script wanted the likes of Gene Hackman and John Cusack.
Finally, Hall's screen career started heating up with the remake of "Kiss of Death" (1995), featuring him as the dying father of ruthless crime boss Nicolas Cage, the John Schlesinger revenge drama "Eye for an Eye" (as a bereaved father-turned-vigilante) and the would-be noir "Hit Me" (both 1996), in which he had a supporting role as a crafty hotel executive who doubles as the boss of a gambling operation. It was the success of "Hard Eight", however, that finally opened eyes to his talent, as Anderson spoke of nurturing a director-star relationship with Hall comparable to that between John Ford and John Wayne or Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. The director remained loyal to his friend and cast Hall in his second feature, "Boogie Nights" (1997), though the role of a businessman who warns producer Burt Reynolds about the impending porn video boom was not one of the central performances.
Having become one of the most sought-after character actors in the business, Hall enjoyed parts as the U.S. attorney general in Wolfgang Petersen's thriller "Air Force One" (also 1997), as the sheriff in Gus Van Sant's ill-fated remake of "Psycho", and as a network executive in Peter Weir's "The Truman Show" (both 1998), which marked the dramatic debut of Jim Carrey. He was everywhere at once at the end of 1999, appearing in four major holiday releases. In his third feature with Anderson, "Magnolia", he played Jimmy Gator, a game show host who has recently discovered he has cancer, and even appeared bare-chested, never questioning his director's vision. Hall also essayed "60 Minutes" executive producer Don Hewitt in Michael Mann's "The Insider", a steel baron married to a countess (Vanessa Redgrave) in Tim Robbins' "Cradle Will Rock" and a detective sent to Europe by the father of one of the victims of Matt Damon's "The Talented Mr. Ripley". He showed no signs of slowing up in the new millennium, portraying an American general in William Friedkin's "Rules of Engagement" and a Catholic priest with a secret in "Lost Souls" (both 2000), the latter the directorial debut of two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski.
Baker's formidable presence added luster to a variety of films, including the political drama "The Contender" (2000), the Tom Clancy military potboiler "The Sum of All Fears" (2002) and the zany Jim Carrey comedy "Bruce Almighty" (2003) as a crusty TV station manager. Hall was then featured in the well-received comedy-drama, “In Good Company” (2004), starring Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid and the ubiquitous Scarlett Johansson. Meanwhile, Hall was cast in the remake of the horror classic, “The Amityville Horror” (2005), as Father McNamara, who tries to exorcise evil spirits that possess the house and force its occupants to commit grisly murders.