SEPTEMBER 9, 2024
James Earl Jones.- Chip East/REUTERS
James Earl Jones, an actor whose thundering Old Testament voice and commanding presence established him as one of his generation’s most indelible performers, whether in Shakespearean tragedies, the “Star Wars” franchise or a Disney animated classic, died Sept. 9 at his home in Pawling, N.Y. He was 93.
His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.
Mr. Jones’s personification of barrel-chested authority in Hollywood and on Broadway, augmented by his 6-foot-2 frame, was in jarring contrast with his extreme timidity in childhood. While being raised on a farm in Mississippi and then Michigan, he spent eight years virtually mute to hide a stammer.
He discovered his love of performing in high school, when a teacher, in an effort to draw him out, called on Mr. Jones to recite a few lines of poetry composed by the young student. Mr. Jones, then 14, was shocked at the sudden confidence in his voice. “The written word is safe for the stutterer,” he later observed. “The script is a sanctuary.”
In a career spanning seven decades, Mr. Jones amassed hundreds of credits on the stage and screen, earning admiration for the humanity and charisma he brought to even the most wounded characters. He belonged to the rarefied cadre of performers who received Tony, Emmy, Grammy and Academy awards, the latter, for Mr. Jones, an honorary Oscar in 2011 citing “his legacy of consistent excellence and uncommon versatility.”
After a screen debut as a bombardier in “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), Stanley Kubrick’s antiwar masterpiece, Mr. Jones evolved into an imposing, even intimidating screen actor, seen or unseen. He provided the voice of the sinister Darth Vader in “Star Wars” (“I am your father”) and the doomed patriarch Mufasa in Disney’s feature “The Lion King” (1994).
Over the years, Mr. Jones built a portfolio of meaty Hollywood character parts. He played the leader of a snake cult in “Conan the Barbarian” (1982); an aging coal miner who casts his lot with 1920s-era strikers in “Matewan” (1987); the father of African princeling Eddie Murphy in the hit comedy “Coming to America” (1988); a cantankerous literary recluse in the baseball fantasy “Field of Dreams” (1989); a blind former ballplayer in “The Sandlot” (1993); and a South African priest tracking down his missing son in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1995).
He also was an intelligence agency boss in a trio of action films based on Tom Clancy books, including “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), “Patriot Games” (1992) and “Clear and Present Danger” (1994).
Mr. Jones’s resonant voice brought gravitas to cable news promos (“This is CNN”), but he also played his vocal prowess for comic effect. In an ad for Sprint, he and Malcolm McDowell ironically declaimed Facebook posts, conferring on them the dignity of Shakespearean prose. Appearing on “Sesame Street,” he gave possibly the most committed reading ever of the alphabet.
Mr. Jones’s résumé was thick with commercials and phone-it-in movies. The paycheck, he admitted, subsidized his foremost love: the theater.
He had come of professional age as an off-Broadway performer, in adventurous fare brimming with topical political themes. In 1961, he enraptured reviewers with his leading role in “The Blacks,” Jean Genet’s absurdist allegory of colonialism, and as Othello in a 1964 staging by Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. Mr. Jones said he portrayed the Moor as a man of “immense inner strength” so that his tragic end — and the deceit by his White confidant that precipitates it — would be all the more resonant to theatergoers amid the civil rights movement.
On Broadway, Mr. Jones earned Tony Awards for his tours de force in Howard Sackler’s “The Great White Hope” (1968) and August Wilson’s “Fences” (1987), both Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. In the former, for which Mr. Jones shaved and oiled his head and underwent a torturous training regimen, he played an early 20th-century championship boxer, based on Jack Johnson, whose defiant pride and love for a White woman prove his undoing against a backdrop of virulent racism.
Mr. Jones holds up the two Emmy Awards he won for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for “Gabriel’s Fire” and Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Mini-Series or Special for the TNT movie “Heat Wave” in Los Angeles in 1991. – Mircovich/Reuters
“Mr. Jones stalks through the play like a black avenging angel,” theater critic Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Times. “Even when corrupted by misery, his presence has an almost moral force to it, and his voice rasps out an agony nearly too personally painful in its nakedness.”
Two decades later, Mr. Jones had another career-defining role in “Fences.” He played Troy Maxson, an illiterate Negro Leagues ballplayer-turned-garbageman in 1950s Pittsburgh. He is a man seething in his own failures and lost dreams, and he betrays his steadfast wife and athletically gifted son.
Jane Alexander and Mr. Jones in “The Great White Hope” at Washington’s Arena Stage in 1967. – Arena Stage/Arena Stage
Mr. Jones while rehearing “Fences” in 1987. – Nick Ut/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Those and his other riveting stage performances — as a brutish husband in Athol Fugard’s anti-apartheid drama “Boesman and Lena” (1970) and as the simple-minded Lennie in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” (1974) — were united by a single thread: Mr. Jones’s compulsion to bring greater nuance and dignity to what he described as “elemental” men, unsophisticated, even basic characters who confront universal problems of friendship, family, love and (thwarted) ambition.
“Fences” culminated with Mr. Jones threatening his rebellious son, played by Courtney B. Vance, with a baseball bat. A new father himself, Mr. Jones was horrified that audiences might be left with the impression that Troy was capable of killing his child. He also said it was important to show Troy, for all his tyrannical behavior, growing as a character.
“I begged them, ‘Would you let us resolve it?’ ” Mr. Jones told The Washington Post, recalling discussions with Wilson and director Lloyd Richards.
“And August didn’t want to write it. So Lloyd said, ‘Okay, we’ll resolve it through pantomime.’ At least I could leave the stage knowing that I couldn’t kill my son. And I can’t tell you what that meant for me, having my own son in my arms. But also, wondering, August is such an insightful writer: Is that in the cards for every father and son?”
Mr. Jones in 2014. – Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post
A father’s role
The specter of an absent father loomed over Mr. Jones’s life.
His parents had separated by the time he was born on his maternal grandparents’ farm in Arkabutla, Miss., on Jan. 17, 1931. In his memoir, “Voices and Silences” (1993), written with Penelope Niven, Mr. Jones described his mother, the former Ruth Connolly, as “mysterious, aggressive, unpredictable … morose and depressed.”
His father, Robert Earl Jones, was also ill-suited to the marriage. A former Golden Gloves boxer, he became a sparring partner for world heavyweight champion Joe Louis and fell into an acting career in all-Black movies and later on Broadway. He was best remembered for playing a con man who initially mentors Robert Redford in the movie “The Sting” (1973).
Mr. Jones was 21 before he met his father, but the older man’s photographs in magazines made him an enigmatic presence in his son’s imagination. Meanwhile, he was raised by his grandparents on a farm in Dublin, Mich., where they had moved in search of better opportunities during the Depression.
At 6, Mr. Jones developed a debilitating stammer. He said he went essentially “incommunicado” for the next eight years, even as he proved a curious and observant child in school.
When Mr. Jones was 14, his new English teacher — a retired college professor — began introducing him to poems by Shakespeare and Longfellow and invited Mr. Jones to write his own verse. The instructor, impressed by the poem Mr. Jones composed about Florida grapefruit, accused him of plagiarism, knowing the charge would spur Mr. Jones to read the lines aloud in class for proof of his authorship.
The moment signaled a turning point in his development. He even joined the forensics team and won statewide debating championships. “Once I found out I could communicate verbally again, it became a very important thing for me,” he later told the Times, “like making up for lost time, making up for the years I didn’t speak.”
When Mr. Jones let slip that he wanted to be an actor, he received a blow to the head from his grandfather, who associated the profession with ne’er-do-wells. Mr. Jones entered the University of Michigan in 1949 and began pre-med studies to satisfy his grandfather, but he was drawn to student theater productions.
He left school shortly before his senior exams and, after a stint in the Army, moved to New York, intent on becoming an actor and rekindling relations with his father, who was getting by mostly as a floor finisher.
Mr. Jones received a diploma from the American Theatre Wing in 1957 and slowly gained traction off-Broadway. He also began a long association with Papp in roles including the Prince of Morocco (“The Merchant of Venice”), Claudius (“Hamlet”) and the title character of “King Lear.”
Director Tom Gries with Mr. Jones and Diana Sands on the set of “Who Do You Kill,” an episode of the television series “East Side-West Side,” in 1963. – Ruben Goldberg/AP
Mr. Jones was unsatisfied with his TV and film work during that era, saying he was mostly confined to roles as doctors, detectives or tribal chiefs. One exception was “East Side/West Side,” a starkly realistic CBS drama starring George C. Scott as a social worker. In an Emmy-nominated guest role in 1963, Mr. Jones played a Harlem father — a raging volcano of a man, tormented by poverty and job discrimination — whose infant daughter is fatally bitten by a rat in her crib.
The enormous success of “The Great White Hope” propelled him reputationally to the front ranks. He and co-star Jane Alexander received Oscar nominations for the 1970 film version — Mr. Jones lost to Scott for “Patton” — and he landed on the cover of Newsweek. He said the attention did not translate into great film parts.
He played the first Black American president in “The Man” (1972) — “a TV show pawned off as a movie,” he later told The Post. In “Claudine” (1974), he played a garbageman and romantic interest of a single mother (Diahann Carroll). He was a Negro Leagues player opposite Billy Dee Williams in “Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings” (1976) and portrayed Malcolm X in “The Greatest” (1977), based on boxer Muhammad Ali’s memoir.
Mr. Jones said Hollywood marginalized him because of his race. He turned down the title role in the 1971 blaxploitation film “Shaft” because he felt no connection beyond skin color to the ladies’ man urban detective. He said he began to eat excessively, his ballooning weight a defense mechanism against such offers.
On TV, he portrayed Balthazar, one of the Three Wise Men, in director Franco Zeffirelli’s miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth” (1977). He also played author Alex Haley in “Roots: the Next Generations,” a sequel to the smash miniseries “Roots,” and starred as a police detective in Steven Bochco’s short-lived “Paris” (both 1979).
Mr. Jones and Diahann Carroll in “Claudine” (1974). – Twentieth Century Fox/Twentieth Century Fox
Mr. Jones, left, as Alex Haley in “Roots: The Next Generations” (1979).
He achieved an Emmy twofer in 1991: In “Gabriel’s Fire” on ABC, he won for his leading role as a former policeman who emerges from prison after serving a 20-year sentence for murder; in “Heat Wave,” a TNT cable network film, he won for his supporting role as the owner of a shoeshine parlor during the Watts riots.
Theater years
Mr. Jones was happiest onstage, and, throughout the 1970s, he performed in works by Lorraine Hansberry, Eugene O’Neill and Anton Chekhov. His portrayal of Black entertainer and left-wing activist Paul Robeson in a one-man play generated headlines when Paul Robeson Jr. loudly criticized the show for trivializing his father’s life. He led pickets outside theaters and started a letter-writing campaign.
Mr. Jones and Phillip Hayes Dean, the play’s African American author, fired back, but in the end, it was the play’s tepid critical reaction that sunk it on Broadway in 1978.
Mr. Jones twice married actresses who played Desdemona to his Othello. His first marriage, to Julienne Marie, ended in divorce. In 1982, he married Cecilia Hart. She died in 2016. Survivors include their son, Flynn.
Well into his 70s and 80s, Mr. Jones starred in Broadway revivals such as “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (as Big Daddy) and “The Gin Game” (as an ornery nursing home resident opposite Cicely Tyson).
His prizes included the National Medal of Arts in 1992 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2002. He shared a Grammy Award for best spoken word recording for “Great American Documents” (1976). In 2022, the Cort Theater in Manhattan was named in his honor.
Mr. Jones played down his most famous role, as the voice of Darth Vader (David Prowse embodied Vader on-screen). He said it was just a day’s work, for which he collected $7,000. He later negotiated a better deal when “Star Wars” became a sensation.
Interviewers sometimes asked Mr. Jones if he took advantage of his forbidding Vader delivery to, say, scare away muggers. He admitted to the Times that he pretended to be Vader only once, while using a CB radio on a cross-country drive.
“The truck drivers would really freak out — for them, it was Darth Vader,” he said. “I had to stop doing that.”
Mr. Jones and his wife, Cecilia Hart, at the Academy Awards in 2012. – Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Courtesy: Washington Post
