Master actor James Earl Jones, who lent his magisterial bass-baritone to roles as varied as the groundbreaking boxer Jack Jefferson in Broadway’s The Great White Hope, bitter ex-baseball player Troy Maxson in Fences, and uber-villain Darth Vader in the Star Wars films, died September 9 at the age of 93 in Dutchess County, New York. The news was confirmed to Deadline by Earl's reps at Independent Artist Group.
In 1969, Jones became the first Black man to win the Tony Award a Best Actor in a Play, for The Great White Hope. He won again in 1987 for Fences. He brought groundbreaking intensity—or gentility, as needed—to his roles, making him the rare performer to be an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) winner. And with the James Earl Jones Theatre on Broadway, Jones is only the second Black theatrical figure to have a Broadway theatre named after him.
Mr. Jones was born January 17, 1931, in Arkabutla, Mississippi. His father, Robert Earl Jones (1910-2006) was also an actor with an extensive Broadway career, which ran from 1945 to 1991 and included Mule Bone. Because of his father’s touring, James Earl was raised by his material grandparents.
Given how important James Earl’s voice was to his subsequent career, it is remarkable to note that he suffered from a stutter that he characterized as “severe,” and barely spoke during the first eight years of his life, out of embarrassment. He later told the London Daily Mail, “Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I'd try to read my lessons and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter… by the time I got to school, my stuttering was so bad that I gave up trying to speak properly. ”
Things improved once Mr. Jones reached high school, when he was challenged by a teacher. “I had started writing poetry in high school and he said of one of them, ‘Jim, this is a good poem. In fact, it is so good I don’t think you wrote it. I think you plagiarized it. If you want to prove you wrote it, you must stand in front of the class and recite it by memory.’ Which I did. As they were my own words, I got through it.”
Mr. Jones graduated into the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, and Dance, where he discovered techniques to get around his “blocks.” He told NPR, “I don't say I was cured. I just work with it.”
Throughout his life, Mr. Jones quietly supported charities for stutterers in the entertainment world, including The Stuttering Foundation and the youth theatre group Stuttering Association for the Young (SAY). In the film The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, he finally played a character with a severe stutter.
There were other challenges ahead. Roles for Black actors were few and far between when he was breaking into the professional acting world in the 1950s. Mr. Jones made his Broadway debut in 1958 playing a butler to the family of Franklin Roosevelt in Dore Schary’s drama Sunrise at Campobello. His mold-breaking days lay in his future—but not too far the the future.
He played Roman Senator Cinna in Infidel Caesar in 1962, and a French revolutionary in the 1965 Lincoln Center Theatre revival of Danton’s Death. The roles got bigger quickly, and soon he was playing lead roles including Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, and Lenny in Of Mice and Men.
His breakthrough role came in 1968, when he played real-life boxer Jack Jefferson, the first African American to win the World Heavyweight Championship, in Howard Sackler’s drama, The Great White Hope. The play won both the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In addition to his challenge to white boxers of the time (the early 20th century), the play examines the effect of this public romance with a white woman (played by Jane Alexander). Mr. Jones won the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for his leading performance. He was the first Black man to win a Tony in that category.
Mr. Jones played a fellow groundbreaking Black actor in the Broadway solo drama Paul Robeson in 1978, but by the middle 1970s he was getting work in Hollywood, leading to perhaps the most famous role of his career, though it used only his voice—Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise. (David Prowse was the actor seen in the costume on screen.) In The Empire Strikes Back, he uttered one of the most famous single lines in all science-fiction, “I am your father.”
Mr. Jones began a long-distance collaboration with anti-apartheid South African playwright Athol Fugard in the 1980s, and starred in the Broadway premieres of two of his dramas, A Lesson from Aloes in 1980, and “MASTER HAROLD”...and the boys in 1982.
In the summer of 1981 he traveled to the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, to appear as the great Shakespearean title character in Othello, opposite Christopher Plummer as the devious Iago. The production transferred to Broadway that winter, winning the Tony Award as Best Reproduction (Play or Musical).
In 1985, Mr. Jones was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. That honor was followed by perhaps Jones’ greatest stage role, Troy Maxson in the 1987 world premiere of August Wilson’s Fences. Jones played a garbage man who once was a baseball star back in the days when Black people were not allowed in the Major League. His bitterness over this and being denied all he wanted from life is increasingly reflected in the way he treats his family. This tragic hero role earned Mr. Jones his second Tony as Best Actor in a Play. The production ran for 525 performances, an unusual feat for a non-musical of the period.
After the success of Fences, Mr. Jones began a long absence from Broadway while he pursued a busy film and TV career that included roles in award-winning productions such as Matewan, Gardens of Stone, L.A. Law, Best of the Best, Gabriel’s Fire, Signs and Wonders, numerous Star Wars spinoffs, and Eddie Murphy’s comedy, Coming to America. A lot of his work was voiceover only, including a stint as narrator on 3rd Rock From the Sun. Children of the 1990s grew up with the sound of his voice, as Mufasa, king of the Pridelands in the Disney animated musical, The Lion King. Jones would reprise the performance in a 2019 re-make. A new prequel film, Mufasa, exploring the backstory of Mr. Jones's iconic character and his final film performance, will be released December 20, 2024.
Along the way Mr. Jones was nominated for many film industry awards, including SAG Awards, Gold Derby, Independent Spirit, Critics Choice, and many others, but often won in honorary or lifetime achievement categories. He was nominated once for an Oscar, in the 1970 film adaptation of The Great White Hope, and was given an honorary Oscar in 2012. He was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award in 1995 for Cry the Beloved Country, and won a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. He was nominated five times for Golden Globes, but won only once, in 1971, as Most Promising Newcomer, again for Great White Hope. He was nominated seven times for Primetime Emmy Awards, and won for the special Heat Wave in 1990.
He won two Tony Awards as Best Actor in a Play outright, for Fences and The Great White Hope, and also took home a Lifetime Achievement Tony 2017. He is also a Grammy winner for Best Spoken Word Album for Great American Documents.
Starting in 2005 Jones began a series of returns to Broadway in revivals of award-winning plays, where he again brought his distinctive touch to a series of roles that had previously been played by white actors. These included On Golden Pond (as Norman Thayer) in 2005, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (as Big Daddy) in 2008, Gore Vidal’s The Best Man (as former President Arthur Hockstader) in 2012, and You Can’t Take It With You (as Martin Vanderhof) in 2014.
In 2010 he appeared on Broadway, and later toured, as the chauffeur Hoke Colburn in the Broadway premiere of Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Driving Miss Daisy opposite Vanessa Redgrave. The production toured and was recorded by PBS for broadcast as part of its Great Performances series, with Angela Lansbury replacing Redgrave.
On September 12, 2022, Broadway's Cort Theatre was rechristened the James Earl Jones Theatre in honor of Mr. Jones' contributions to the American theatre.
Mr. Jones’ final Broadway performance was playing the cranky oldster Weller Martin opposite Cicely Tyson in a 2015 revival of The Gin Game. However, Mr. Jones returned to the stage briefly, in a cameo role, in the 2016 Encores! Off Center concert performance of the musical God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. He can be heard on the cast recording, released in 2017. Even then, he broke ground in his career: It was his first musical.
He will be deeply, dearly missed. Mr. Jones is survived by his son, Flynn Earl Jones.
