Born: January 17th, 1931
Died: September 9th, 2024
James Earl Jones, a stuttering farm child who became a voice of rolling thunder as one of America’s most versatile actors in a stage, film and television career that plumbed race relations, Shakespeare’s rhapsodic tragedies and the faceless menace of Darth Vader, has died at the age of 93.
From destitute days working in a diner and living in a $19-a-month cold-water flat, Jones climbed to Broadway and Hollywood stardom with talent, drive and remarkable vocal cords. He was abandoned as a child by his parents, raised by a racist grandmother and mute for years in his stutterer’s shame, but he learned to speak again with a Herculean will. All that had much to do with his success.
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So did plays by Howard Sackler and August Wilson that let a young actor explore racial hatred in the national experience; television soap operas that boldly cast a black man as a doctor in the 1960s; and a decision by George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, to put an anonymous, rumbling African-American voice behind the grotesque mask of the galactic villain Vader.
The rest was accomplished by Jones himself: a prodigious body of work that encompassed scores of plays, nearly 90 television network dramas and episodic series, and some 120 films. They included his voice work, much of it uncredited, in the original Star Wars trilogy and in the credited voiceover of Mufasa in The Lion King.
Jones was no matinee idol, like Cary Grant or Denzel Washington. But his bulky everyman suited many characters, and his range of forcefulness and subtlety was often compared to Morgan Freeman’s.
Under the artistic and competitive demands of daily stage work and heavy commitments to television and Hollywood – pressures that burn out many actors – Jones was a rock. He once appeared in 18 plays in 30 months. He often made a half-dozen films a year, in addition to his television work. And he did it for a half-century, giving thousands of performances that captivated audiences, moviegoers and critics.
[ James Earl Jones, voice of Darth Vader and The Lion King’s Mufasa, dies at 93Opens in new window ]
They were dazzled by his presence. A bear of a man – 6ft 2in (188cm) tall and 90kg – he dominated a stage with his barrel chest, large head and emotional fires, tromping across the boards and spitting his lines into the front rows. And audiences were mesmerised by the voice. It was Lear’s roaring crash into madness, Othello’s sweet balm for Desdemona, Oberon’s last rapture for Titania, the queen of the fairies on a midsummer night. He liked to portray kings and generals, garbage men and bricklayers; perform Shakespeare in Central Park and the works of August Wilson and Athol Fugard on Broadway. He could strut and court lecherously, erupt with rage or melt tenderly.
Some theatergoers, aware of Jones’ childhood affliction, discerned occasional subtle hesitations in his delivery of lines. The pauses were deliberate, he said, a technique of self-restraint learned by stutterers to control involuntary repetitions. Far from detracting from his lucidity, the pauses usually added force to an emotional moment.
Another of his theatrical techniques was to stand alone for a few minutes in a darkened wing before the curtain went up, settling himself and silently evoking the emotion he needed for the first scene. It became a nightly ritual during performances of Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Fences (1987), in which Jones portrayed a sanitation worker brooding over broken dreams, his once-promising baseball career cut short by big league racial barriers. It ran for 15 months on Broadway, and Jones won a Tony for best actor.
Jones’s technique in the first Star Wars trilogy – A New Hope (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) – was to speak in a narrowly inflected range, almost a monotone, to make nearly every phrase sound threatening. (He was credited for voice work in the third film, but, at his request, it was not credited in the first two until a special edition re-release in 1997.)
Jones was one of the first black actors to appear regularly on daytime soaps. His first Hollywood role was small but memorable, as the B52 bombardier in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satire on nuclear war, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
He did not win film stardom until 1970, when he played Jack Jefferson, a character based on Jack Johnson, the first black boxing champion, in The Great White Hope, reprising a role he performed on Broadway in 1968. He won a Tony for the stage work and was nominated for an Oscar for the movie.
Jones came to believe that learning to control his stutter had led to his career as an actor
Although he was never active in the civil rights movement, Jones said early in his career that he admired Malcolm X and that he, too, might have been a revolutionary had he not become an actor.
James Earl Jones was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi to Robert Earl and Ruth (Connolly) Jones, and was proud of claiming African-American, Native American and Irish ancestry. In 2002, he told a congressional subcommittee on education reform: “Parthenia Connolly was my great, great grandmother. She made her way to this country from Ireland before the civil war. She indentured herself as a servant and ended up in Mississippi, where she met and eventually married my great-great-grandfather, Brice… Parthenia lived in a very different age, an age where because she dared to teach a black man to read, she was a criminal in the eyes of the law. The man she taught, her husband, Brice, a black man who had the audacity to learn how to read, was guiltier than she was and subject to the harshest punishment if his secret was known.”
“I’m part-Irish, part-African and part-Cherokee,” he later said in an interview. “I cannot be partisan in any direction.”
About the time of his birth, his father left the family to chase prizefighting and acting dreams. His mother eventually obtained a divorce. But when James was five or six, his frequently absent mother remarried, moved away and left him to be raised by her parents, John and Maggie Connolly, on a farm near Dublin, Michigan.
Abandonment by his parents left the boy with raw wounds and psychic scars. He referred to his mother as Ruth – he said he thought of her as an aunt – and he called his grandparents Papa and Mama, although even the refuge of his surrogate home with them was a troubled place to grow up.
“I was raised by a very racist grandmother, who was part-Cherokee, part-Choctaw and black,” Jones told the BBC in a 2011 interview. “She was the most racist person, bigoted person I have ever known.” She blamed all white people for slavery, and Native American and black people “for allowing it to happen”, he said, and her ranting compounded his emotional turmoil.
Traumatised, James began to stammer. By age eight he was stuttering so badly, and was so mortified by his affliction, that he stopped talking altogether. Friendless, lonely, self-conscious and depressed, he endured years of silence and isolation.
“No matter how old the character I play,” Jones told Newsweek in 1968, “even if I’m playing Lear, those deep childhood memories, those furies, will come out. I understand this.”
In high school, an English teacher, Donald Crouch, began to help him. He found that James had a talent for poetry and encouraged him to write, and tentatively to stand before the class and read his lines. Gaining confidence, James recited a poem a day in class. The speech impediment subsided. He joined a debating team and entered oratorical contests. By graduation, in 1949, he had largely overcome his disability, although the effects lingered and never quite went away.
Years later, Jones came to believe that learning to control his stutter had led to his career as an actor. “Just discovering the joy of communicating set it up for me, I think,” he told the New York Times in 1974. “In a very personal way, once I found out I could communicate verbally again, it became a very important thing for me, like making up for lost time, making up for the years that I didn’t speak.”
Jones enrolled at the University of Michigan on a scholarship, taking pre-med courses, and joined a drama group. With a growing interest in acting, he switched majors and focused on drama.
In college, he had also joined the armybut resigned and moved to New York, determined to be an actor. He lived briefly with his father, whom he had met a few years earlier. Robert Jones had a modest acting career and offered encouragement. James found cheap rooms on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, took odd jobs and studied at the American Theater Wing and Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio.
After minor roles in small productions, including three plays in which Jones performed with his father, he joined Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in 1960; over several years he appeared in Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. During a long run as Othello in 1964, he fell in love with Julienne Marie, his Desdemona. They were married in 1968 and divorced in 1972. In 1982, Jones married actress Cecilia Hart, who had also played Desdemona to one of his Othellos. She died in 2016. They had a son, Flynn Earl Jones, who survives him, along with a brother, Matthew. – The New York Times