James Earl Jones, the renowned actor of stage and screen who lent his booming, inimitable voice to Darth Vader and The Lion King, died Monday morning at the age of 93.
Jones died at his home in Duchess County, New York, with his family surrounding him, the actor’s representatives at Independent Artist Group confirmed to Rolling Stone. No cause of death was given.
In the decades before venturing off to “a galaxy far, far away,” Jones was a Tony-winning Broadway star, first winning Best Actor in 1970 for his role of a Jack Johnson-inspired boxer in the play The Great White Hope; Jones was similarly nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the same role in the play’s big-screen adaptation.
Jones spent the majority of the Sixties establishing himself on the stage, becoming one of the era’s preeminent Shakespearean actors. His film debut came in 1964 with a small role in Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War black comedy Dr. Strangelove, playing a bombardier aboard the nuke-dropping airplane.
Big-screen roles in The Comedians, The Man, Claudine, and The Greatest — the latter a Muhammad Ali-starring biopic where Jones played Malcolm X — followed. However, Jones would soon make his biggest impact in cinema from a recording booth and not in front of the camera.
For 1977’s Star Wars, British bodybuilder David Prowse provided Darth Vader’s imposing onscreen presence under the sleek black suit. However, Prowse’s heavy accent and verbal delivery infamously didn’t mesh with the intimidating character — his Star Wars cast mates jokingly called him “Darth Farmer” during shooting — so director George Lucas searched elsewhere to give the villain the voice it deserved.
“I knew the voice had to be very, very special,” Lucas said in 2015 at an American Theatre Wing gala honoring Jones. “It was a tough choice, but in the end, it was a really easy choice. It was really a choice between Orson Welles and James Earl Jones. James Earl Jones won hands down. He created, with very little dialogue, one of the greatest villains that ever lived.”
“I understand that George did contact Orson Welles to read for the voice of Darth Vader before he contacted me,” Jones said in The Making of Star Wars. “I was out of work, and he said, ‘Do you want a day’s work?’” (Jones was ultimately only paid $7,000 for the first Star Wars film, and while he was uncredited during the movie’s initial run, Jones was retroactively added to the credits on subsequent releases.)
“One of the world’s finest actors whose contributions to Star Wars were immeasurable,” Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films, said in a statement. “He’ll be greatly missed.” He added on Twitter, “RIP Dad.”
Jones voiced Darth Vader in the first three Star Wars films — A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi — as well as the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. He’d return to the role as cameos in 2005’s Revenge of the Sith (providing a guttural “No!”), the animated series Star Wars Rebels, 2016’s Rogue One, and finally 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker.
While Darth Vader didn’t exactly represent cinema’s most loving father, paternal roles would become the lynchpin of Jones’ work: In 1988’s Coming to America, he played King Jaffe Joffer, the father of Eddie Murphy’s Prince Akeem, a role he would reprise 33 years later in 2021’s Coming 2 America.
In another royal role, Jones voiced Mufasa in the 1994 animated classic The Lion King and its live-action remake in 2019. “I’m really a dopey dad,” Jones told AFI. “So they started to impose my facial expressions onto Mufasa and a different tone of voice. Yeah, he was authoritative, but he was just a gentle dad.”
“I grew up in the exact generation that grew up with him as a performer, so to have James Earl Jones and his voice and the memories that his voice evokes and how iconic he is, not just from this but as Darth Vader … it felt like a very significant milestone when we recorded him,” director Jon Favreau said in 2019. “He would do a take and then he would ask me for direction, and I honestly couldn’t give an answer! I was like, ‘You’re Mufasa.’ Far be it from me.… Everything he said sounded perfect because it was him saying it.”
As Jones acknowledged in interviews, these paternal roles were, in a way, his means of coming to terms with his own childhood. Despite having one of Hollywood’s most distinct and commanding voices, Jones spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence suffocating his gift: The Mississippi-born son of teacher Ruth and boxer Robert Earl Jones — who left the family prior to his son’s birth — James was raised by his grandparents, who as part of the Great Migration, moved the young James from Mississippi to Michigan, where the trauma of his early life manifested into a stuttering problem.
“I didn’t want to talk — bad enough that I just gave up. I couldn’t introduce myself to people who visited the house, and it was too painful,” Jones told NPR of his self-imposed silence.
However, in high school, through the arts — in his case, writing and reciting poetry — Jones reclaimed his voice. Initially a pre-med student in college, Jones majored in drama at the University of Michigan, a calling that — despite not being raised by his father — was in his genes: Robert Earl Jones, or just Earl Jones as he became known, emerged as a well-known actor after leaving his family, making his debut in a Langston Hughes play before embarking on a Hollywood career that included films like The Sting, Trading Places, and The Cotton Club.
After spending time in the military during the tail end of the Korean War — he was never deployed into action — the actor moved to New York, where he further honed his craft at the American Theatre Wing.
“They taught us not to put ethnic or gender limits on the characters that we studied,” Jones said in 2015. “They taught us speech for Shakespeare, and speech for Arthur Miller, and speech for Tennessee Williams, and speech for George Lucas,” alluding to his most well-known role.
Amid his initial run voicing Darth Vader, Jones also co-starred in the maligned Exorcist II: The Heretic, the British cult horror film Blood Tide, and as the antagonist Thulsa Doom in the Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring 1982 fantasy film Conan the Barbarian.
Jones became a prolific supporting actor throughout the Eighties and Nineties: a baseball author in search of a Field of Dreams; a blind ex-baseball player/suburban myth in a heartwarming cameo in The Sandlot; a duplicitous NSA agent in Sneakers; and Admiral James Greer in a trio of films based on Tom Clancy’s books, The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, and A Clear and Present Danger. Jones was also responsible for the “This Is CNN” tag heard countless times on the news network. “He was the voice of CNN and our brand for many decades, uniquely conveying through speech instant authority, grace, and decorum,” the network wrote in a statement.
Despite retiring from the Darth Vader role — and acting in general — in 2022, Jones ensured that future generations would still hear him in the character when he made a then-cutting edge deal to re-create his trademark voice artificially through an AI program; the technology was first utilized on the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi.
An unofficial EGOT winner — his lone Oscar was a non-competitive Academy Lifetime Award — Jones twice won Best Actor in a Play at the Tony Awards, was a three-time Emmy Award winner, and earned a Best Spoken Word Grammy in 1977 for Great American Documents. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from both the Tonys and the Screen Actors Guild, and was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2002.
Charles S. Dutton, Jones’ one-time understudy, said of the actor at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony, “Although I was attending one of America’s greatest acting schools, my real acting classes occurred was when I watched you in rehearsals. Your professionalism, your discipline, your zest and love for the craft of acting. We, the students, we spoke your name very slowly: James. Earl. Jones. And with the utmost respect, we called you then, and still call you today, ‘The King of the American Theater.’”
“When I was starting out, there were only two Black actors that you saw with any regularity: Sidney Poitier in film, and James Earl Jones onstage,” added Courtney B. Vance, who played Jones’ son for three years in a Broadway staging of Fences. “He was my father on the stage. And he was my surrogate father in real life.”
From Rolling Stone US
