Explore the inspiring journey of James Earl Jones, who overcame a childhood stutter to become a legendary actor. He is celebrated for his iconic voice roles and commanding presence on Broadway and Hollywood.
James Earl Jones was not just a talented actor, but also a highly acclaimed one. He breathed life into characters like Darth Vader in ‘Star Wars’ and Mufasa in ‘The Lion King.’ He amassed an impressive collection of awards, including Tonys, Golden Globes, Emmys, and an honorary Oscar.
In 1980, his remarkable vocal talent and determination propelled him to stardom on Broadway and Hollywood.
Humble Beginnings and a Struggle with Speech
James Earl Jones, a farm boy who overcame a stutter to become a voice of thunderous power and one of America’s most versatile actors, died on Monday at his home in Dutchess County, N.Y. He was 93. His agent’s office, Barry McPherson, confirmed his passing in a statement.
Mr. Jones rose from humble beginnings, working in a diner and living in a cheap, cold-water flat, to achieve stardom on Broadway and in Hollywood. His success was fueled by his talent, drive, and extraordinary voice. Abandoned by his parents as a child and raised by a racist grandmother, he spent years unable to speak due to his stutter. However, through sheer willpower, he learned to speak again, which played a crucial role in his success.
Impact on Racial Representation in Entertainment
His career was not just about his personal success, but also about the impact he had on racial representation in the entertainment industry. He was shaped by plays that explored racial tensions in America, groundbreaking television roles that cast him as a Black doctor in the 1960s, and George Lucas’s decision to use his anonymous, powerful African American voice for the iconic villain Darth Vader in ‘Star Wars.’
An Impressive Body of Work
Mr. Jones’s impressive body of work included numerous plays, nearly 90 television dramas and series, and about 120 films. His voice work, often uncredited, was a cornerstone of the original ‘Star Wars’ trilogy and Disney’s ‘The Lion King,’ where he voiced Mufasa in both the 1994 animated version and the 2019 computer-animated remake, leaving an indelible mark on these iconic films.
While not a conventional leading man like Cary Grant or Denzel Washington, Mr. Jones’s sturdy build suited a wide range of characters, showcasing his acting versatility. His ability to portray characters from forceful to subtle drew comparisons to Morgan Freeman. Though not a singer, his voice was sometimes likened to the great Paul Robeson’s, albeit less powerful.
Legacy and Accolades
Throughout his career, Mr. Jones garnered numerous accolades, including Tonys, Golden Globes, Emmys, Kennedy Center honors, and an honorary Academy Award, a testament to the breadth of his talent and the impact of his performances.
Stage and Film: Balancing a Demanding Career
Facing the intense demands of daily stage performances and heavy TV and film commitments—pressures that often exhaust actors—Mr. Jones stood firm. He once performed in 18 plays within 30 months. On top of his TV roles, he frequently starred in up to six films annually. This pace continued for five decades, resulting in thousands of performances that enthralled audiences and critics alike.
Commanding Presence and Unique Acting Style
His presence left viewers awestruck. A towering figure — 6’2″ and 200 pounds — he commanded the stage with his broad chest, large head, and fiery emotions. He’d stride across the boards, projecting his lines into the front rows. The audience was spellbound by his voice, which could embody Lear’s descent into madness, Othello’s gentle comfort for Desdemona, or Oberon’s final enchantment for Titania, the fairy queen.
He enjoyed portraying a diverse range of characters, from kings and generals to garbage collectors and bricklayers. His performances spanned from Shakespeare in Central Park to August Wilson and Athol Fugard on Broadway. He could strut and flirt, explode with anger or melt with tenderness; he was equally at home as the blustering Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (2008) or as the aging Norman Thayer Jr. in Ernest Thompson’s meditation on mortality, “On Golden Pond” (2005).
Notable Stage Techniques and Overcoming a Speech Impediment
Aware of Mr. Jones’s childhood speech impediment, some theatergoers noticed occasional brief pauses in his line delivery. He explained these as intentional, a technique learned by stutterers to control involuntary repetitions. Rather than hindering his clarity, these pauses often amplified emotional moments.
Mr. Jones benefited from deeply analyzing his lines. In his 1993 memoir “Voices and Silences,” co-written with Penelope Niven, he stated, “My early muteness led me to approach language differently than most actors. I dissected words, sometimes making a mess, but seeing truth from a unique perspective.”
Pre-Performance Ritual and Success in “Fences”
Another of his stage techniques involved standing alone in a dark wing before curtain-up, centering himself and silently summoning the emotion needed for the opening scene. This became a nightly ritual during performances of Mr. Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fences” (1987). In this play, Mr. Jones portrayed a sanitation worker brooding over shattered dreams, his once-promising baseball career cut short by racial barriers in the major leagues. The show ran for 15 months on Broadway, earning Mr. Jones a Tony for Best Actor.
Mr. Jones’s approach in the initial “Star Wars” trilogy — “A New Hope” (1977), “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) and “Return of the Jedi” (1983) — was another hallmark. To maintain Vader’s menace — a voice matching his dark cape and breath-filtering helmet — Mr. Jones used a narrow vocal range, almost monotone, making each phrase sound ominous. (He received voice credit in the third film, but at his request, not in the first two until a 1997 special edition rerelease.)
Television Pioneer and Breakthrough in Film
Mr. Jones pioneered as one of the first Black actors regularly featured in daytime soaps, playing doctors in “The Guiding Light” and “As the World Turns” in the 1960s. TV became a cornerstone of his career. He appeared in dramas like “The Defenders,” “Dr. Kildare,” “Touched by an Angel” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and in mini-series, including “Roots: The Next Generation” (1979), portraying author Alex Haley.
Mr. Jones’s Hollywood debut was brief but impactful, as the B-52 bombardier in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 nuclear war satire, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
“The Great White Hope” and Civil Rights Influence
While critics noted his acting progress, Mr. Jones’s film stardom arrived in 1970, playing Jack Jefferson, inspired by Jack Johnson, the first Black boxing champion, in “The Great White Hope,” reprising his 1968 Broadway role. He won a Tony for the stage performance and an Oscar nomination for the film.
Though not actively involved in the civil rights movement, Mr. Jones admired Malcolm X early in his career and believed he might have become a revolutionary if not for acting.
Shaping Views on Race: “The Blacks”
He saw his civil rights contributions in roles addressing racial issues — of which there were many. Notable was his often-overlooked casting in the 1961 play “The Blacks,” Jean Genet’s intense drama on race relations. It featured a Black cast including Maya Angelou, Cicely Tyson, Louis Gossett Jr. and Billy Dee Williams, some wearing eerie white masks, nightly enacting a kangaroo court’s rape and murder of a white woman. Mr. Jones, the brutal yet captivating lead, found the role so emotionally taxing that he left and rejoined the cast several times during its three-and-a-half-year Off Broadway run.
The experience helped shape his views on race. “That role made me see the Black man in America as a tragic hero,” he shared with The Washington Post in 1967. “He’s like Oedipus, Hamlet, Macbeth, even the everyday Willy Loman, Uncle Tom, and Uncle Vanya in today’s American life.”
Early Life and Family Struggles
James Earl Jones was born on January 17, 1931, in Arkabutla, Mississippi. His parents were Robert Earl and Ruth (Connolly) Jones. His father left soon after his birth to pursue boxing and acting. James’s mother later divorced and remarried when James was 5 or 6. She moved away, leaving him with her parents, John and Maggie Connolly, on a farm near Dublin, Michigan.
His parents’ absence left deep emotional scars. He called his mother Ruth, seeing her more as an aunt. He referred to his grandparents as Papa and Mama, though even their home wasn’t always peaceful.
“My grandmother, who raised me, was very racist,” Mr. Jones told the BBC in 2011. “She was part Cherokee, part Choctaw, and Black. She was the most bigoted person I’ve ever known.” His mother blamed white people for slavery and other groups “for letting it happen,” he said. Her anger added to his emotional struggles.
Years of Silence: The Impact of Stuttering
James began to stutter due to trauma. By age 8, his stammer was so bad that he stopped talking altogether, afraid he’d only speak gibberish. In his small rural school in Manistee County, Mississippi, he communicated by writing notes. He felt lonely, self-conscious, and sad, enduring years of quiet isolation.
“No matter how old the character I play,” Mr. Jones told Newsweek in 1968, “even if I’m playing Lear, those deep childhood memories, those strong emotions, will come out. I understand this.”
Discovering His Voice
In high school in nearby Brethren, an English teacher named Donald Crouch began to help him. He noticed James had a talent for poetry and encouraged him to write, and he slowly started reading his work to the class. James gained confidence and recited a poem daily in class. His speech improved. He joined a debate team and entered speaking contests. By graduating in 1949, he mainly had overcome his speech problem, though some effects lingered.
As time passed, Mr. Jones came to see his struggle with stuttering as a catalyst for his acting career.
“I think discovering the joy of communication set the stage for me,” he shared with The New York Times in 1974. “On a personal level, once I could speak again, it became crucial to me, like making up for lost time, for the years I couldn’t talk.”
University of Michigan and Early Acting Career
Mr. Jones entered the University of Michigan on a scholarship, initially taking pre-med courses and joining a drama group. As his interest in acting grew, he switched his focus to drama in the university’s School of Music, Theater and Dance. In his memoir, he mentioned leaving college in 1953 without finishing, but later returning to complete his studies. He earned his drama degree in 1955.
During college, he also joined the Army through R.O.T.C., but didn’t make it through Ranger School. However, he excelled in cold-weather training in the Rockies, considering a military career. He became a second lieutenant in mid-1953, after the Korean War ended, and later advanced to first lieutenant.
In 1955, though, he left the military and moved to New York, set on becoming an actor. He briefly lived with his father, whom he’d met a few years earlier. Robert Jones had a modest acting career and offered support. James found cheap housing in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, took odd jobs, and studied at the American Theater Wing and Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio.
Shakespeare Takes Center Stage
After small roles in minor productions, including three plays 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 for Julienne Marie, his Desdemona.
They married in 1968 but divorced in 1972. In 1982, he wed actress Cecilia Hart, who had also played Desdemona to his Othello. She passed away in 2016. They had a son, Flynn Earl Jones, who survives him, along with a brother, Matthew.
Film Career and Awards
Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, Mr. Jones was in high demand for stage work in New York, films in Hollywood, and TV roles on both coasts. He took occasional breaks at a desert retreat near Los Angeles and at his home in Pawling, N.Y., in Dutchess County.
However, his extended stint with “Fences” in 1987-88, including a nationwide tour, proved overwhelming. He stepped away from Broadway for a considerable time, focusing almost entirely on film work. His standout movie roles included a struggling miner in Sayles’ “Matewan” (1987), an African monarch in Landis’ “Coming to America” (1988) – a part he revisited at 90 in the 2021 sequel, a disillusioned yet determined author in “Field of Dreams” (1989), and a South African clergyman in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1995).
Mr. Jones received numerous accolades: the National Medal of the Arts from President Bush in 1992, Kennedy Center honors in 2002, an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2011, and in 2017, both a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement and an honorary doctorate from Harvard.
Later Years and Broadway Legacy
In 2015, Mr. Jones and Cicely Tyson starred in a Broadway revival of Coburn’s 1976 play, “The Gin Game,” portraying retirement home residents engaging in friendly, and sometimes not-so-friendly, card games. For the 84-year-old Mr. Jones, this marked his sixth Broadway role in a decade, as noted by The Times.
In 2022, Broadway’s century-old Cort Theater was renamed the James Earl Jones Theater.
Source:
Robert D. McFadden (September 9, 2024). James Earl Jones, Actor Whose Voice Could Menace or Melt, Dies at 93. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/09/arts/james-earl-jones-dead.html. Accessed September 9, 2024
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Header Image:
President George H. W. Bush and Mrs. Barbara Bush present the Medal of Arts to James Earl Jones.
Photo credit: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
