By Felix Kessler James Earl Jones, who conquered a crippling stammer to become an award-winning Broadway actor and voice Darth Vader’s deep bass in Star Wars movies, has died. He was 93.
He died today at his home in Dutchess County, New York, Deadline reported, citing the actor’s respresentatives at Independent Artist Group.
Barrel chested and 6 feet 2 inches tall, Jones was a dominating presence whether on stage, on screen or merely by sound. In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, critic David Thomson said that Jones’s voice was “one of the great basses of our time, selling things on TV or emanating from behind the visor of Darth Vader.”
Doing Darth Vader’s voice brought in commercial and voice-over work, Jones wrote in Voices and Silences, his 1993 autobiography. He admitted making many mediocre movies to help “subsidize” his work on stage, where, he said, “you don’t make much money, even on Broadway.”
He won a Tony award for best actor as the boxer Jack Jefferson in The Great White Hope, which opened in 1968, a role he reprised in the 1970 film version to earn an Oscar nomination. He acted in about 20 other Broadway plays, from Othello to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and performed Driving Miss Daisy in London’s West End as well as on Broadway.
An actor’s job onstage “is to fill the whole space with sound, movement, emotion, animal presence and energy,” Jones wrote in his memoir. The opposite works better in film, he said, where acting must be subtle and suggestive.
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TV work
On television in the 1960s, he was a physician in Dr. Kildare, a detective in The Defenders and a tribal chief in Tarzan.
He played a senator who becomes the first Black US president in The Man, a 1972 TV movie that foreshadowed the actual event by 36 years.
Jones appeared in ads for some Bell Atlantic Corp. units in the late 1980s and became the commercial spokesman for the entire company in the mid-1990s. When Bell Atlantic and GTE Corp. merged in 2000 to form Verizon Communications Inc., he became the public face of the new company.
Jones won a second Tony for his role in the 1987 Broadway production of August Wilson’s play Fences. He received the National Medal of Arts and a Tony Award for lifetime achievement.
Born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, on Jan. 17, 1931, Jones was the son of teenage parents, Robert Earl Jones and Ruth Connolly. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Maggie Anderson Connolly and John Henry Connolly, whom he called Ma and Pa.
Jones traced his stutter to two early traumatic events. At 4, when his grandparents moved to Michigan, they sought to leave him behind with his mother. After he became almost hysterical, they relented and took him along.
On arriving in Dublin, Michigan, kids in the town’s one-room school mocked his Southern accent so much that he froze.
“For about eight years, from the time I was 6 until I was about 14, I was virtually mute,” he wrote.
He lost his stutter one day in high school. A teacher made him recite a poem he’d written to prove it was an original work and that he hadn’t copied it. “And so, gradually, my powers of speech were resurrected,” Jones said.
Father and son
He soon couldn’t get enough of debating, orating or acting activities in high school. By the time he entered the University of Michigan in 1949, he knew he wanted to be an actor.
Around then, he met his father for the first time. Robert Earl Jones, a former sparring partner for Joe Louis, had drifted into acting and invited his son to visit him in New York, where he’d appeared in some plays.
They went to theater together and spent hours discussing Shakespeare’s Othello — a role the son subsequently played many times but that always eluded his father.
The younger Jones followed a US Army officer training course while studying at the University of Michigan, then went on active duty as a second lieutenant in 1953 without graduating.
After completing his military service, Jones pursued acting. He performed in summer stock productions in Michigan before heading to New York, where he took acting classes and stayed with his father before moving into his own apartment.
“Six months in my father’s house in New York were not going to make up for those 21 years of absence,” he wrote.
His early weakness — a voice constrained by a stutter — became his strength and trademark through constant exercise, he said. His speech teacher in those early years, Nora Dunfee, remained his voice coach through much of his career.
In 1963, Newsweek called Jones a “dynamo” on stage, yet he struggled financially.
Then, as Jones put it, he was struck twice by lightning. First, when he was cast as Jack Jefferson, modeled after the real-life heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, in The Great White Hope.
“I knew immediately that this was a role I had to play,” he wrote.
Shedding pounds
Not that the part was easy. Never an athlete, Jones said training was “much worse than anything the army ever required of me, even in Ranger training.”
He rose early to run three miles daily with an ex-boxer, then spent two hours in a gym skipping rope and punching a body bag. Almost 37 before tackling the play, his preparation led him to add muscle while shedding 25 pounds.
Before the play opened on Oct. 3, 1968, Jones was a respected but not well known actor. After the premier, his career reached a new level.
“If anyone deserves to become that occasional thing, a star overnight, then Mr. Jones deserves no less,” wrote Clive Barnes, who reviewed the work for the New York Times.
Jones was nominated for an Oscar when Great White Hope was made into a movie in 1970, though he was disappointed with the film.
Jones said he was “extraordinarily blessed” a second time when cast in Fences. After a year in the play, Jones withdrew and said he no longer had the energy to endure long runs in the theater. Instead, he did more television and films.
With his wife, the former Cecilia Hart, he had a son, Flynn Earl Jones. She died in 2016. He was divorced from his first wife, Julienne Marie, an American actress.