American actor James Earl Jones, known for his performances on stage and screen, passed away on Sept. 9, 2024. He was 93 years old.
A graduate of the University of Michigan, the Mississippi-born Jones was the son of Robert Earl Jones. Robert Earl Jones was himself an actor of renown who had supporting roles in his later years in “The Sting,” “Trading Places,” “The Cotton Club,” and “Witness.”
With a career that spanned seven decades, Jones got his start on stage in 1955, playing the title character in “Othello.” He would later appear in other 1960s’ Shakespearean productions including “King Lear,” “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” “Measure for Measure,” and “Hamlet.”
Jones got his big break in 1964 with his brief but key role as Lt. Lothar Zogg, a bombardier in Stanley Kubrick’s landmark war satire “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.” This led to another major supporting role in the 1967 political drama, “The Comedians,” starring with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, and Peter Ustinov.
The late actor enjoyed his first career zenith in 1970 while playing boxer Jack Johnson opposite Jane Alexander in “The Great White Hope.” Both Jones and Alexander received Oscar nominations for their performances in the film, and Jones seemed poised to go on to greater heights. This, unfortunately, never came to pass.
‘Star Wars’
In 1976, writer-director-producer George Lucas cast the relatively unknown British actor David Prowse as the principal antagonist Darth Vader in his upcoming “space opera,” “Star Wars,” (ultimately known as “Star Wars: Episode Four—A New Hope”).
Having never done voice-over work, Jones thought the role was a “special effect” role and asked not to be credited. He was hired and the rest is history.
Jones would go on to voice Vader in the next two “Star Wars” installments (“The Empire Strikes Back” and “The Return of the Jedi”) and two later 21st-century “Star Wars” movies. While not unprecedented, the Prowse/Jones tag-team performance of a mostly faceless villain is that of cinematic legend.
A Working Actor
While he could have easily retired on “Star Wars” royalties and rested on his laurels at this point, Jones went back to his stage roots. He appeared in the 1987 production of August Wilson’s “Fences.” This garnered him his second Best Actor Tony Award; the role was later played in the film of the same name starring and directed by Denzel Washington.Two years later, Jones co-starred as fictional 1960s novelist Terence Mann in the Kevin Costner baseball fantasy “Field of Dreams.” For many audiences this marked the first time they had ever seen Jones on screen. His rich, honey-tinged, basso profundo voice still harkened back to Darth Vader, but seeing him do kind of the same thing simultaneously on screen netted him another new audience.
For the remainder of his career, Jones appeared in several high-profile productions (“Coming to America,” “The Hunt for Red October,” “Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger,” and “The Sandlot”). He found yet another new audience as the voice of Mustafa in the original 1994 version of “The Lion King.”
Jones was an anomaly among his acting brethren. He kept a low profile and shied away from declaring any kind of political affiliations. By most definitions, he was a “character actor,” someone who added flavor to productions without fanfare or drawing too much attention to himself. He was an “actor’s actor” who valued craft over fame and talent over exposure. He was old school.
The numbers of those sharing Jones’s modest mindset are slowly but surely dwindling. He, like his father, was a throwback to a time when getting the job done right was more important than snagging headlines in the tabloids.
