James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones (born January 17, 1931) is an American actor. His career has spanned more than 60 years, and he has been described as “one of America’s most distinguished and versatile” actors and “one of the greatest actors in American history”. Since his Broadway debut in 1957, Jones has won many awards, including a Tony Award and Golden Globe Award for his role in The Great White Hope. Jones has won three Emmy Awards, including two in the same year in 1991, and he also earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role in the film version of The Great White Hope. He is also known for his voice roles as Darth Vader in the Star Wars film series and Mufasa in Disney’s The Lion King, as well as many other film, stage and television roles.
Jones has been said to possess “one of the best-known voices in show business, a stirring basso profondo that has lent gravel and gravitas” to his projects, including live-action acting, voice acting, and commercial voice-overs. As a child, Jones had a stutter. In his episode of Biography, he said he overcame the affliction through poetry, public speaking, and acting, although it lasted for several years. A pre-med major in college, he went on to serve in the United States Army during the Korean War before pursuing a career in acting. On November 12, 2011, he received an Honorary Academy Award. On November 9, 2015, Jones received the Voice Arts Icon Award. On May 25, 2017, he received an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Harvard University and concluded the event’s benediction with “May the Force be with you”.
From Arkabutla, Mississippi Jones’s father, the actor Robert Earl Jones left his family before his son was born, and young Jones was raised by his grandparents in Michigan. As a boy, Jones had such a relentless stutter that, for eight years, he refused to talk and was functionally speechless. While in high school Jones’s teacher discovered his gift for writing poetry, and encouraged public speaking of his works to help him out of his silence. The educator insisted that he recite a poem to the class each day.
In 1953, Jones graduated from the University of Michigan, majoring in drama, after which he had a brief stint in the U.S. Army. One special experience with oration came when he left the army in the mid-1950’s. (Then) young Jones found his father and performed a monologue of the impulsive young soldier character Hotspur from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. Jones went to New York City and studied at the American Theatre Wing and with Lee Strasberg.
He played in his first off-Broadway production in 1957 and subsequently, with the New York Shakespeare Festival, played a number of Shakespearean roles from 1961 to 1973. He also performed in other New York productions and won a Tony award for his boxer role in Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope (1968), later starring in the film version (1970). Through the 1970’s and ’80’s he received critical acclaim for a number of stage, film, and television roles, notably in the two-character stage play Paul Robeson (1978) and in the title role of Othello, opposite Christopher Plummer’s Iago (1981-82).
Currently, as the voice of CNN and Bell Atlantic, and after a long career as a theatre, film and television actor, Jones’s steady, authoritative voice is among the most recognizable in the world.
In 2009, Jones guest starred in the Fox medical drama House, M.D., in season 6, episode 4, entitled “The Tyrant”, as a brutal African dictator named Dibala who has fallen ill. The dictator had made threats of ethnic cleansing against an ethnic minority, the Sitibi, and the team deals with ethical issues of treating a potential mass murderer. In 2013-14, he appeared alongside Malcolm McDowell in a series of commercials for Sprint in which the two recited mundane phone and text-message conversations in a dramatic way.Jones appeared as himself on the season 7 episode of The Big Bang Theory entitled “The Convention Conundrum”.
Jones married American actress/singer Julienne Marie in 1968, whom he met while performing as Othello in 1964. They had no children, and divorced in 1972. In 1982, he married actress Cecilia Hart, with whom he had one child, son Flynn Earl Jones. Hart died on October 16, 2016, after a one-year battle with ovarian cancer. In April 2016, Jones spoke publicly for the first time in nearly 20 years about his long-term health challenge with type 2 diabetes. He has been dealing with diabetes since the mid 1990s.
In 2015, Jones starred as the Chief Justice Caleb Thorne in the American drama series Agent X alongside actress Sharon Stone, Jeff Hephner, Jamey Sheridan, and others. The television series was aired by TNT from November 8 to December 27, 2015, running only one season and 10 episodes.
Written by Dianne Washington