James Earl Jones, a commanding presence onscreen who nonetheless gained greater fame off-camera as the sonorous voice of Star Wars villain Darth Vader and Mufasa, the benevolent leader in The Lion King, died Monday. He was 93.
Jones, who burst into national prominence in 1970 with his powerful Oscar-nominated performance as America’s first Black heavyweight champion in The Great White Hope, died at his home in Dutchess County, New York, Independent Artist Group announced.
The distinguished star made his big-screen debut in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and was noteworthy in many other films, including Claudine (1974) opposite Diahann Carroll; Field of Dreams (1989), as the reclusive author Terence Mann; and The Sandlot (1993), as the intimidating neighborhood guy Mr. Mertle.
For his work on the stage, Jones earned two best actor Tony Awards: for originating the role of Jack Jefferson — who was based on real-life boxer Jack Johnson — in 1968 in Howard Sackler’s Great White Hope and for playing the patriarch who struggles to provide for his family in a 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning production of August Wilson’s Fences.
Jones, the recipient of an honorary Oscar at the 2011 Governors Awards and a special Tony for lifetime achievement in 2017, was one of the handful of people to earn an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony and the first actor to win two Emmys in one year.
“You cannot be an actor like I am and not have been in some of the worst movies like I have,” the self-deprecating star said when he was given his Academy Award. “But I stand before you deeply honored, mighty grateful and just plain gobsmacked.”
Jones’ rise to become one of the most-admired American actors of all time was remarkable considering he suffered from a debilitating stutter as a child.
Born Todd Jones on Jan. 17, 1931, he grew up in Arkabutla, Mississippi, and was raised by his maternal grandparents. At age 5, the family moved to a farm in Dublin, Michigan.
“That move was traumatic somehow,” he once recalled. “My ability to communicate dropped out. I couldn’t speak to people without breaking up and stuttering,” and he pretended to be mute.
When an English teacher in high school encouraged Jones to read a poem to the class that he had written, he discovered that his stutter vanished whenever he spoke words that he had memorized. He won a public-speaking contest as a senior and earned a full scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he studied medicine and discovered acting.
He made his stage debut in a community theater production in Manistee, Michigan, before he left to serve in the Korean War.
After being discharged, Jones moved to New York to pursue theater and made his Broadway debut in 1958 in Sunrise at Campobello, the Tony winner for best play that was written by Dory Schary and starred Ralph Bellamy as polio-stricken President Franklin Roosevelt.
Jones told THR in 2011 that his career was guided by words that his father, Robert Earl Jones — an actor who had been blacklisted from the industry by the House Un-American Activities Committee but appeared in The Sting — told him when he was just starting out.
“If you want to do this business, you gotta do it because you love it, not because it’s gonna make you rich or famous. That was the best advice he could give me,” he said.
Kubrick cast Jones as Lt. Lothar Zogg, a member of the B-52 bomber crew, in Dr. Strangelove after spotting him in New York in a Shakespeare in the Park production.
“George C. Scott was playing Shylock when Kubrick came to look him over,” he recalled in a January 2014 interview. “I was also in the play, as the Prince of Morocco, and Kubrick said, ‘I’ll take the Black one, too.’ That’s not what he actually said, but that’s the way I like to put it.”
His performance opposite future National Endowment for the Arts chairman Jane Alexander in Great White Hope (she also earned a Tony) netted him the cover of Newsweek magazine in October 1968 (headline: “New Star on Broadway”), and for the film version, he would become only the second Black man (after Sidney Poitier) to score a best actor Oscar nom.
When director George Lucas was searching for a bass voice for Darth Vader as he was casting Star Wars (1977), he reportedly considered Orson Welles but felt his voice might be too recognizable. So he called Jones’ agent and asked if the actor would like a day’s work.
Jones got a flat fee of $7,000 for the job and did not acknowledge that he was the voice of Darth Vader until the third film in the franchise.
Once, while traveling cross-country, Jones broke out his Darth Vader voice on the CB radio scanner. “The truck drivers would really freak out — for them, it was Darth Vader. I had to stop doing that,” he told The New York Times magazine.
As for voicing his character in The Lion King, Jones said in a 2011 interview that he still got a kick out of meeting kids who were devoted to the 1994 Disney classic.
“Their parents will say, ‘There’s Mufasa!’ But I don’t look like a lion, and if they’re real little kids, they think they’re being shafted or having the wool pulled over their eyes,” he said. “And I can’t roar to prove it to them, but I can say [in Mufasa’s voice], ‘Simba. You have deliberately disobeyed me!’”
Jones, of course, also was known as the “voice” of CNN.
“I just emptied my mind, then filled it with the thought of all the hundreds of stories — tragic, violent, funny, touching — that could be following my introduction,” he said when asked about his motivation. “And then I said, ‘This is CNN.’”
Onscreen, Jones also was memorable as “Few Clothes” Johnson in John Sayles’ Matewan (1987), as Rev. Stephen Kumalo in the apartheid drama Cry, the Beloved Country (1995) and as Robert Duvall’s embittered half-brother in A Family Thing (1996).
He played Admiral Greer in three films based on Tom Clancy novels — The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994) — and was King Jaffe Joffer in a pair of Coming 2 America movies, including a 2020 sequel.
Jones’ two Emmys came in 1991 for playing a private detective who was wrongly imprisoned on the short-lived ABC drama Gabriel’s Fire and as the owner of a shoe-repair business in the TNT telefilm Heat Wave, about the 1965 Los Angeles Watts riots.
Among the myriad of roles he played onstage included Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; President Arthur Hockstader in The Best Man; and chauffeur Hoke Colburn in Driving Miss Daisy, opposite Angela Lansbury.
In 2022, the 110-year-old Cort Theatre on Broadway was renamed The James Earl Jones Theatre in his honor.
He married actress Julienne Marie in 1968 after meeting her during a production of Othello, but they divorced four years later. He met his second wife, actress Cecilia Hart, while they were taping the CBS police drama Paris, in which he starred as a police captain and she played a young cop. They were married in 1982 and had a son, Flynn. Hart died in October 2016 of ovarian cancer at age 68.