(17 January 1931 - 9 September 2024)
The American actor James Earl Jones, who has died aged 93 following many years suffering from type 2 diabetes, was an acting force to be reckoned with. Not only was he a brilliant classical actor on stage but he also conquered the cinema and television with nearly two hundred performances. He is a member of that impressive company of EGOTs, performers who have won the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards. And of course almost everybody will have heard him as the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars films. James Earl Jones was born in Arkabutla in Tate County, Mississippi, to Robert Earl Jones, a chauffeur, and Ruth Connolly, a teacher and maid. His father left the family and became an actor. James never met his father until the 1950s.
As a child he lived with his grandparents in Michigan, where he developed a stammer which he corrected later in high school where he recited poetry. At university he studied drama to BA level. He acted until he joined the army, after which he studied at the American Theatre Wing in New York. In his first job in Michigan, he played Othello, and in 1958 was in Dore Schary’s Sunrise at Campobello about F.D. Roosevelt, at the New York Cort Theatre. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove saw Jones making his film debut as a young lieutenant and then he was the Haitian rebel leader in The Comedians with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. For playing Jack Jefferson in the boxing movie The Great White Hope he was nominated for an Academy Award but had already won a Tony for the stage production. He played a black president in The Man and was a house painter and amateur poet in the rarely shown film The River Niger with Cicely Tyson. The Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars & Motor Kings was a sports comedy about a black baseball team. Jones was Malcolm X in The Greatest, Tom Gries’ biopic on Muhammad Ali, and in the same year, 1977, came Star Wars with Jones cast as the iconic voice of Darth Vader.
Other films included Exorcist II: The Heretic, Sidney Poitier’s comedy A Piece of the Action, and Conan the Barbarian. With Eddie Murphy he did John Landis’s Coming to America and was in the sports fantasy Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner. He was Admiral James Greer in the spy thrillers The Hunt for Red October with Sean Connery, and Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, both with Harrison Ford. He even played himself in True Identity with Lenny Henry and in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult too. His last films include Disney’s The Lion King, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Coming 2 America, his final film in 2021.
There was also an amazing roster of TV appearances from East Side/West Side in 1963 to episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi in 2022, a spin-off series from Star Wars, again with Jones as the voice of Darth Vader. There is also James Earl Jones’s stage career to consider. Following his debut in Sunrise at Campobello in 1959, he went on to appear in many productions in the US, the UK and Australia, a mixture of classic and modern drama including The Merchant of Venice, The Winter’s Tale, Othello, Coriolanus. Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing, the last a famous ‘late’ production at The Old Vic with Jones, 82, as Benedick and Vanessa Redgrave, 76, as Beatrice. His modern plays included Genet’s The Blacks, Brecht’s Baal, Buchner’s Danton’s Death, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Ernest Thompson’s On Golden Pond, Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, August Wilson’s Fences (Tony award for Jones) and Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, plus the title role in Philip Hayes Dean’s Paul Robeson.
Jones received umpteen awards including two Primetime Emmys and a Lifetime Achievement Award, a Golden Globe, a Grammy, an Honorary Oscar and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame, won the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Centre Honour. In 2022 the Cort Theatre where Jones made his Broadway debut was renamed the James Earl Jones Theatre. He married the actress Julienne Marie in 1968 (they divorced in 1972) and in 1982 married the actress Cecilia Hart, by whom he had a son, Flynn. Hart died in 2016.
MICHAEL DARVELL
