Outside the Beltway

James Earl Jones, 1931-2024

The legendary star of stage and screen is gone at 93.

James Joyner · Tuesday, September 10, 2024 · 3 comments

The Associated Press, “James Earl Jones, acclaimed actor and voice of Darth Vader, dies at 93“

James Earl Jones, who overcame racial prejudice and a severe stutter to become a celebrated icon of stage and screen — eventually lending his deep, commanding voice to CNN, “The Lion King” and Darth Vader — has died. He was 93.

His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed Jones died Monday morning at home in New York’s Hudson Valley region. The cause was not immediately clear.

The pioneering Jones, who in 1965 became one of the first African American actors in a continuing role on a daytime drama (“As the World Turns”) and worked deep into his 80s, won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Tony Awards, a Grammy, the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors. He was also given an honorary Oscar and a special Tony for lifetime achievement. In 2022, a Broadway theater was renamed in his honor.

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Jones created such memorable film roles as the reclusive writer coaxed back into the spotlight in “Field of Dreams,” the boxer Jack Johnson in the stage and screen hit “The Great White Hope,” the writer Alex Haley in “Roots: The Next Generation” and a South African minister in “Cry, the Beloved Country.”

He was also a sought-after voice actor, expressing the villainy of Darth Vader (“No, I am your father,” commonly misremembered as “Luke, I am your father”), as well as the benign dignity of King Mufasa in both the 1994 and 2019 versions of Disney’s “The Lion King” and announcing “This is CNN” during station breaks. He won a 1977 Grammy for his performance on the “Great American Documents” audiobook.

“If you were an actor or aspired to be an actor, if you pounded the pavement in these streets looking for jobs, one of the standards we always had was to be a James Earl Jones,” Samuel L. Jackson once said.

Some of his other films include “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Greatest” (with Muhammad Ali), “Conan the Barbarian,” “Three Fugitives” and playing an admiral in three blockbuster Tom Clancy adaptations — “The Hunt for Red October,” “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger.” In a rare romantic comedy, “Claudine,” Jones had an onscreen love affair with Diahann Carroll.

LeVar Burton, who starred alongside Jones in the TV movie “Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones,” paid tribute on X, writing, “There will never be another of his particular combination of graces.”

Jones made his Broadway debut in 1958’s “Sunrise At Campobello” and would win his two Tony Awards for “The Great White Hope” (1969) and “Fences” (1987). He also was nominated for “On Golden Pond” (2005) and “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” (2012). He was celebrated for his command of Shakespeare and Athol Fugard alike. More recent Broadway appearances include “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “The Iceman Cometh,” and “You Can’t Take It With You.”

As a rising stage and television actor, he performed with the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater in “Othello,” “Macbeth” and “King Lear” and in off-Broadway plays.

The New York Times, “James Earl Jones, Whose Powerful Acting Resonated Onstage and Onscreen, Dies at 93“

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, died on Monday at his home in Dutchess County, N.Y. He was 93.

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From destitute days working in a diner and living in a $19-a-month cold-water flat, Mr. 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 had much to do with his success.

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 Mr. Jones himself: a prodigious body of work that encompassed scores of plays, nearly 90 television network dramas and episodic series, and some 120 movies. They included his voice work, much of it uncredited, in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, in the credited voice-over of Mufasa in “The Lion King,” Disney’s 1994 animated musical film, and in his reprise of the role in Jon Favreau’s computer-animated remake in 2019.

Mr. 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. Nor was he a singer; yet his voice, though not nearly as powerful, was sometimes likened to that of the great Paul Robeson. Mr. Jones collected Tonys, Golden Globes, Emmys, Kennedy Center honors and an honorary Academy Award.

Under the artistic and competitive demands of daily stage work and heavy commitments to television and Hollywood — pressures that burn out many actors — Mr. 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.

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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; play the blustering Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (2008) or an aging Norman Thayer Jr. in Ernest Thompson’s confrontation with mortality, “On Golden Pond” (2005).

Some theatergoers, aware of Mr. Jones’s 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.

Mr. Jones profited from a deep analysis of meaning in his lines. “Because of my muteness,” he said in “Voices and Silences,” a 1993 memoir written with Penelope Niven, “I approached language in a different way from most actors. I came at language standing on my head, turning words inside out in search of meaning, making a mess of it sometimes, but seeing truth from a very different viewpoint.”

The Washington Post, “James Earl Jones, commanding actor who voiced Darth Vader, dies at 93“

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.

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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.”

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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 the Star Wars films (“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 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.

Not mentioned in any of the above obits is that he was commissioned as an Army officer out of the University of Michigan’s ROTC program. He just missed the Korean War but completed Infantry training and the demanding Ranger School and then helped establish a cold weather training command before his discharge as a first lieutenant. While I suspect his drive and talent would have led to a fine career as a soldier, we can all agree that he made the right choice in returning to acting.

Jones’ first film appearance in Dr. Strangelove came the year before I was born, so he has always been a famous actor in my mind. That he continued to work well into his 80s is remarkable and a testament to his love of his craft. The sheer range of the roles he played was stunning.