A towering figure in 20th century American theatre and the pre-eminent African American actor of his generation, James Earl Jones was known for his interpretations of both modern and classical roles, said The Daily Telegraph. He played Othello seven times; he turned in a "titanic" performance as the raging Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"; he played the crusty retired academic Norman in a 2005 staging of "On Golden Pond"; and won a Tony for his performance as the frustrated garbage collector in August Wilson's "Fences."
His looks – powerful, commanding, magisterial – were a large part of the equation, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. "But it was how he sounded that made him a legend." A great rumbling basso profundo, his voice was "like a thunderstorm surmounting the horizon". One critic described it as "the sound Moses might have heard when addressed by God". Famously, he provided the voice of the menacing Darth Vader in the "Star Wars" films, and of the noble lion Mufasa in "The Lion King".
His vocal cords were undoubtedly a great asset, said The New York Times. But it also took versatility, talent and "Herculean" drive for Jones, who has died aged 93, to rise to Hollywood and Broadway stardom. He was born in Mississippi in 1931. His mother, Ruth Jones, was a maid and a teacher; his father, Robert Earl Jones, left the family early on to pursue a career first as a boxer and then as an actor (in films including "Trading Places" and "The Sting"). When he was five, the family moved to rural Michigan, where Jones was raised on a farm by his grandmother – a woman of part-Cherokee descent who detested white people. He found the move profoundly unsettling, and developed a stammer so severe that he stopped speaking. At high school, however, he found he could express himself through poetry, and started to overcome his stammer by developing a notably precise diction. "You find yourself with a weak muscle, and you exercise it. And sometimes that becomes your strong muscle," he said later.
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He studied drama at the University of Michigan and, after a period in the military, moved to New York, where he worked as a janitor while trying to get ahead as an actor. Jones was not active in the civil rights movement, said The New York Times; his contribution, he said, was to reflect upon racial issues in his work. In 1961, he appeared alongside Maya Angelou, Louis Gossett Jr and Cicely Tyson in "The Blacks", Jean Genet's drama about race relations. Working on that play, he told The Washington Post in 1967, "I came to realise that the black man in America is the tragic hero, the Oedipus, the Hamlet, the Macbeth, even the working class Willy Loman, the Uncle Tom and Uncle Vanya of contemporary American life".
In 1968, he took the lead role in Howard Sackler's play "The Great White Hope", about a boxing champ dealing with a racist boxing establishment. He won the first of his two Tonys and, when he reprised the role on screen, he was nominated for an Oscar. After that, he was in constant demand for film and stage work. During the filming of "Star Wars", the English former bodybuilder Dave Prowse wore Darth Vader's costumes and also spoke the villain's lines (and was nicknamed Darth Farmer, owing to his West Country accent). He hoped his voice would be used in the film, but George Lucas hired Jones to re-record the lines in post-production; a diving regulator was used to create the mechanical breathing sound. Insisting he was just a "special effect", Jones declined to be credited for the first two films in the series.
His other films included "The Man" (in which he played the first black president) and "Field of Dreams". In 2011, he was awarded an honorary Oscar. His first marriage, to the actress Julienne Marie, lasted just four years. In 1982, he married Cecilia Hart, who had played Desdemona to his Othello. She died in 2016. Their son survives him.
