With James Earl Jones, there was always the voice. It rumbled. It poured over you, thick as molasses. It sounded regal, even when he was playing a humble ex-ballplayer instead of a king. It was always unmistakably his — he wasn’t even credited as the voice of Darth Vader in the first two Star Wars films, but everyone of course knew — yet remarkably versatile within what could have been a limited basso profundo range. He could be the epitome of evil as Vader, a clear figure of goodness and reason as King Mufasa in The Lion King, or a signifier of the value of journalism and democracy as the man who declared “This… is CNN” in a ubiquitous series of promos. The voice made such an impression that, when Luke Skywalker removed Vader’s helmet at the end of Return of the Jedi, many audience members were dismayed to see the face of elderly white English actor Sebastian Shaw, rather than Jones’ own distinctive mug. (Or even that of another Black performer.)
In nearly every other live-action role Jones played over his long and distinguished career, the voice went hand in glove with the body from whence it came. Jones took up space in every possible way. He was 6’2” and broad as a barn even when he was young and trim enough to play fighter Jack Johnson in his breakout role in The Great White Hope. Actors are generally smaller than you think they are, so Jones tended to loom over his costars physically as well as verbally. And when he wanted to — really, when he was allowed to, in a career that made him a global icon but was in many ways much more limited than his talents deserved — he could blow people off the screen with his fundamental dramatic or comic gifts as a performer, size and voice be damned.
With the news that Jones has died at the age of 93, thoughts of course turn first to that voice: to him almost purring as Vader tells an underling, “I find your lack of faith disturbing,” or to him in Field of Dreams solemnly explaining that baseball “reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.” But limiting the discussion to that amazing instrument belittles the other talents, and the overall legacy, of a man who was such a giant in so many senses of the word.
You likely know some of Jones’ origin story by now, including the fact that this man with the golden voice had a childhood stutter so severe, he felt too embarrassed to introduce himself to strangers. He overcame that struggle through his art (starting with reading poetry aloud in high school English class) and eventually became a respected Broadway actor; his screen debut in Dr. Strangelove came about because director Stanley Kubrick came to watch George C. Scott in a production of The Merchant of Venice, and was taken with Scott’s large young co-star. In 1968, he won a Tony for the original stage production of The Great White Hope, then became only the second Black nominee, after Sidney Poitier, for the Best Actor Oscar when it was turned into a 1970 film.
That imposing screen presence proved a double-edged sword throughout Jones’ screen career, but especially early on. He wasn’t classically handsome like Poitier — though he could be swaggering and magnetic in films like the baseball comedy The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings — so leading man roles were harder to come by. But he was such a striking camera subject, and so charismatic, that there was often a risk of him overshadowing any actor asked to stand in his vicinity. Because of his stage background, and because his voice and bearing could make him seem so patrician, he was placed into the same kind of trap that would befall Black stars who followed him, like Morgan Freeman: Too often, he was hired because of the authority and dignity that radiated from him, rather than because a filmmaker had a complicated character that they wanted to let Jones explore.
When given the chance to play men rather than symbols, though, Jones was a wonder to behold.
Field of Dreams was the middle of a trio of classic baseball films he appeared in over the years (the other was The Sandlot). As was so often the case, it’s not his movie. Kevin Costner is the star, gets the big emotional arc, gets to tearfully have a catch with the ghost of his late father, gets to be a movie star in the best kind of way, etc. And Jones absolutely steals the movie out from under him.
In the book Field of Dreams was based on, Shoeless Joe, Costner’s character Ray Kinsella recruits Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger to help him on his quest to bring some magic to a baseball diamond built in an Iowa cornfield. Salinger threatened to sue if his name was used in the movie, so writer-director Phil Alden Robinson had to create a character who would convincingly inspire a similar level of awe. Much of this was accomplished simply through the fact that James Earl Jones, of all people, was playing author Terence Mann. But Robinson and Jones also let Mann be hilariously prickly (“I’m gonna beat you with a crowbar, until you go away,” the exasperated author tells Ray in their first meeting), palpably weary of a legacy he never asked for, and genuinely delighted to find the ghosts of Shoeless Joe Jackson and Mel Ott playing a game in front of him. So when Robinson’s camera pushes in, the James Horner score soars, and Mann begins to deliver his speech about the beauty and value of baseball(*), the monologue is beautiful because Jones has made him into such a complicated, lovable person.
(*) The one part of the speech, and film, that’s never sat quite right, especially since the characters Jones played in Bingo Long and The Sandlot were both modeled on legendary Negro Leagues slugger Josh Gibson: All the ballplayers given a chance by Ray’s field are white, rather than any of the men like Gibson who were barred from playing against the likes of Shoeless Joe due to the color of their skin. And a character embodied by Jones delivers this paean to the purity of baseball without so much as a subtle nod to that fact.
Like many great actors who kept finding lead movie roles elusive, Jones gave television several tries and became the rare actor to win two Emmys in the same year, in 1991, for a TV-movie about the Watts riots called Heat Wave, and for starring in Gabriel’s Fire, a short-lived private eye drama about a man released from prison after serving 20 years for a murder he didn’t commit. From his first Emmy-nominated role (as a financially struggling man facing a family tragedy in the Sixties social-worker drama East Side West Wide) to his last (as a coal miner and jazz pianist in a few episodes of the early Aughts family drama Everwood), he gave everything asked of him.
Gabriel’s Fire was a rare case of executives looking at Jones in Serious Actor mode and wondering if they should let him be funnier; after its first season, it was revamped into a much more lighthearted series called Pros and Cons, with Jones and Richard Crenna playing the same characters in both. This version only lasted half a season, though, and made it harder in the future for Jones to put his metaphorical jester’s cap back on. But he found opportunities whenever possible to play around with his own image. In the second-ever episode of Sesame Street, he recited the alphabet in his familiar stentorian tones. He played the voice of Maggie Simpson in a “Treehouse of Horror” episode, and tweaked his penchant for being cast as authority figures by playing the boss on the “Mathnet” segments of the public television math show Square One. In the early Nineties, he did a series of TV ads for the Bell Telephone yellow pages, each script clearly written with the knowledge of who would be delivering lines like, “This is the book that got Bubba cooked.” And Mufasa wasn’t even the first African monarch Jones had played, since The Lion King was preceded by his rascally turn as the arrogant King Jaffe Joffer in Eddie Murphy’s 1988 charmer Coming to America.
He reprised the role in the 2021 sequel Coming 2 America, but most of his final screen credits were voice-only, including playing Mufasa again in the CGI Lion King, and Vader in various Star Wars films and shows. The last of those, in 2022’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series, is credited to Jones, but he didn’t actually work on it; by that point, he had signed away the rights for Lucasfilm to digitally recreate his voice for any future projects, and an AI program generated the new Vader dialogue based on his earlier work. Like a lot about that show, the Vader voice approximated what we knew from past Star Wars projects without having the magic that made those special. You can use a computer to mimic the sound of Jones, but that voice wasn’t just about the volume or tone. It was about an incredible actor using those tools in service of a full and rich performance, even one where he wasn’t otherwise physically present.
Given Hollywood’s addiction to nostalgia, odds are we’ll keep hearing approximations of Jones for a long, long time. But the real voice, and the master thespian attached to it, has been silenced. Rest in peace.
From Rolling Stone US
