James Earl Jones, who overcame racial prejudice and a severe stutter to become a celebrated icon of stage and screen — eventually lending his deep, commanding voice to CNN, The Lion King and Darth Vader — has died. He was 93.
His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed Jones died Monday morning at home in New York’s Hudson Valley region. The cause was not immediately clear.
The pioneering Jones, who was one of the first African American actors in a continuing role on a daytime drama and worked deep into his 80s, won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Tony Awards, a Grammy, the National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Honors and was given an honorary Oscar and a special Tony for lifetime achievement. In 2022, a Broadway theater was renamed in his honor.
He cut an elegant figure late in life, with a wry sense of humor and a ferocious work habit. In 2015, he arrived at rehearsals for a Broadway run of The Gin Game having already memorized the play and with notebooks filled with comments from the creative team. He said he was always in service of the work.
“The need to storytell has always been with us,” he told The Associated Press then. “I think it first happened around campfires when the man came home and told his family he got the bear, the bear didn’t get him.”
Jones created such memorable film roles as the reclusive writer coaxed back into the spotlight in Field of Dreams, the boxer Jack Johnson in the stage and screen hit The Great White Hope, the writer Alex Haley in Roots: The Next Generation and a South African minister in Cry, the Beloved Country.
He was also a sought-after voice actor, expressing the villainy of Darth Vader (“No, I am your father,” commonly misremembered as “Luke, I am your father”), as well as the benign dignity of King Mufasa in Disney’s animated The Lion King and announcing “This is CNN” during station breaks. He won a 1977 Grammy for his performance on the Great American Documents audiobook.
“If you were an actor or aspired to be an actor, if you pounded the payment in these streets … one of the standards we always had was to be a James Earl Jones,” Samuel L. Jackson once said.
Some of his other films include Dr. Strangelove, The Greatest (with Muhammad Ali), Conan the Barbarian, Three Fugitives and playing an admiral in three Tom Clancy blockbuster adaptations — The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. In a rare romantic comedy, Claudine, Jones had an onscreen love affair with Diahann Carroll.
Jones made his Broadway debut in 1958’s Sunrise At Campobello and would win his two Tony Awards for The Great White Hope (1969) and Fences (1987). He also was nominated for On Golden Pond (2005) and Gore Vidal’s The Best Man (2012). He was celebrated for his command of Shakespeare and Athol Fugard alike. More recent Broadway appearances include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Driving Miss Daisy, The Iceman Cometh, and You Can’t Take It With You.
As a rising stage and television actor, he appeared in As the World Turns in 1965, one of the first Black actors to have such a role on daytime TV. He performed with the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater in Othello, Macbeth and King Lear and in off-Broadway plays.
Early years
Jones was born by the light of an oil lamp in a shack in Arkabutla, Mississippi, on Jan. 17, 1931. His father, Robert Earl Jones, had deserted his wife before the baby’s arrival to pursue life as a boxer and, later, an actor.
When Jones was 6, his mother took him to her parents’ farm near Manistee, Michigan. His grandparents adopted the boy and raised him.
“A world ended for me, the safe world of childhood,” Jones wrote in his autobiography, Voices and Silences. “The move from Mississippi to Michigan was supposed to be a glorious event. For me it was a heartbreak, and not long after, I began to stutter.”
Too embarrassed to speak, he remained virtually mute for years, communicating with teachers and fellow students with handwritten notes. A sympathetic high school teacher, Donald Crouch, learned that the boy wrote poetry, and demanded that Jones read one of his poems aloud in class. He did so faultlessly.
Teacher and student worked together to restore the boy’s normal speech. “I could not get enough of speaking, debating, orating — acting,” he recalled in his book.
At the University of Michigan, he failed a pre-med exam and switched to drama, also playing four seasons of basketball. He served in the Army from 1953 to 1955.
In New York, he moved in with his father and enrolled with the American Theater Wing program for young actors. Father and son waxed floors to support themselves while looking for acting jobs.
True stardom came suddenly in 1970 with The Great White Hope. Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play depicted the struggles of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, amid the racism of early 20th-century America. In 1972, Jones repeated his role in the movie version and was nominated for an Academy Award as best actor.
Jones’ two wives were also actors. He married Julienne Marie Hendricks in 1967. After their divorce, he married Cecilia Hart, best known for her role as Stacey Erickson in the CBS police drama Paris, in 1982. She died in 2016. They had a son, Flynn Earl, born in 1983.
No artist ‘has served America more’
In 2022, the Cort Theater on Broadway was renamed after Jones, with a ceremony that included Norm Lewis singing Go the Distance, Brian Stokes Mitchell singing Make Them Hear You and words from Mayor Eric Adams, Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson Jackson.
“You can’t think of an artist that has served America more,” director Kenny Leon told the AP. “It’s like it seems like a small act, but it’s a huge action. It’s something we can look up and see that’s tangible.”
Citing his stutter as one of the reasons he wasn’t a political activist, Jones nonetheless hoped his art could change minds.
“I realized early on, from people like Athol Fugard, that you cannot change anybody’s mind, no matter what you do,” he told the AP. “As a preacher, as a scholar, you cannot change their mind. But you can change the way they feel.”
