Twenty-three years ago Hall was driving his Volkswagen north on Interstate 405 in Costa Mesa, Calif., when an 18-wheeler crossed the median and flattened his car before colliding with three others. Hall was trapped under several tons of twisted metal. He could smell gasoline and feel the flames nearby. "It was so hot I felt cold," he recalls. Then he heard the voice of a policeman that made him tremble with fear. "Forget about him," the cop called out. "Get everyone out of here."
Fortunately for Hall, 54, someone with a fire extinguisher showed up, and he was saved. But not before he suffered burns over 65 percent of his body, injuries requiring 50 pints of blood, 20 skin grafts and the amputation of both legs. Now his role on CSI makes him one of a handful of disabled actors seen regularly in prime time. "I was the wrong guy in the wrong place," he says. "But now I'm the right guy in the right place."
In a way, his six months in the University of California, Irvine, burn unit helped Hall with his audition. "Since it was a medical role, there were words in the script designed to trip you up," he says. "But I had a command of the vocabulary."
Hall, the oldest of five children of attorney Robert Franklin Hall and homemaker Mary Martha Davies, both now deceased, didn't consider acting as a career until he had been outfitted with artificial legs. "The accident crystallized my desire to try things I had always been fearful of," he says. "I didn't want to turn 50 without having tried something I wanted to do."
Born in East Orange, N.J., Hall developed an early passion for music. After hearing Elvis Presley sing, he taught himself to play the guitar. In 1962 the family settled in L.A., where he finished high school two years later. After graduating from UCLA, where he majored in English literature, in 1971, Hall turned his love of music and his melodramatic voice into a job as a radio disc jockey. Then came the crash. "I was wrapped like a mummy most of the time," he says. "So all I did was read mystery novels and watch baseball. That and eat a lot of Popsicles." His physical therapy (two hours a day) continued for a couple of years after he left the hospital. Family and friends helped him get through it. "He didn't take a lot of medication," recalls his second wife, homemaker Connie Cole, whom he wed a year after the accident. (Hall's 1971 marriage to artist Susan Petroni ended in 1974.) "He had a real determination to live."
Hall learned how to drive with hand controls and returned to radio. In '81 he and Cole had a son, Andrew, now 20 and a student at Moor-park College in Moorpark, Calif.
But Hall wanted more. Years earlier, while at UCLA, he had taken acting classes and scored straight A's—a first in his college career. He started answering calls for disabled actors and in 1983 landed a small film role in Deal of the Century. He also began acting lessons with Gordon Hunt, father of actress Helen Hunt. Five years later, at age 42, Hall decided to pursue acting full-time. "I was a middle-aged balding actor, but I was prepared to slug it out," he says. The gamble paid off: He landed recurring roles on L.A. Law and Life Goes On and appearances in the movies The Negotiator and Starship Troopers. Unfortunately the uncertainties of an acting career led to the breakup of his nine-year marriage. "We were drifting apart," he says. "But we're both a lot happier now."
In 1999 Hall married Judy Stearns, 52, a publicist for a state senator. He also began lobbying for disabled actors, whom he says are often ignored by casting agents. "All I can ask for is a fair shot," he says. "When I work, I want people to think, 'He's a damn good actor who happens to be disabled.' "
Veronica Byrd
Lorenzo Benet in Los Angeles
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- Lorenzo Benet.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
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