The thunder-voiced actor who commanded the screen
James Earl Jones’ voice reverberated through six decades of stage and screen history. That rich, resonant, and instantly recognizable basso profundo elevated every line he delivered, whether in a Shakespearean tragedy or a Disney blockbuster. It exuded regal sagacity in his role as Mufasa in The Lion King (1994) and, through the filter of scuba gear, unfathomable menace as the planet-vaporizing Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise. It announced to cable TV viewers, “This is CNN.” And combined with his imposing, solemn physicality, it lent gravitas and majesty to roles as kings, generals, coal miners, and garbagemen. But Jones never took himself too seriously. On a road trip, he confessed in a 2014 interview, he once broke out into his Darth Vader voice over his CB radio. “I had to stop doing that,” he said. “The truck drivers would really freak out.”
Though he had “one of the most famous voices in cinema,” he started out as a child traumatized into silence, said The Wall Street Journal. He was born in Arkabutla, Miss., to a father—actor and prizefighter Robert Earl Jones—who’d abandoned the family and an unstable mother who left to become a migrant worker. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, who headed north to Michigan as part of the Great Migration. The upheaval gave him a stutter, and mockery from other children rendered him “virtually mute” from ages 6 to 14, he later said. A high school teacher helped him realize that reciting memorized words made speaking easier, and by his senior year he had won an oratory competition and a scholarship to the University of Michigan. After graduation and military service, he reunited with his father in New York City in 1955 and “scratched a living” as an actor for years, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). His appearance in a 1962 Shakespeare in the Park production of The Merchant of Venice caught the eye of Stanley Kubrick, who gave him a small part in Dr. Strangelove. But his breakout wouldn’t come until he was 37, when he gave a Tony-winning performance as a boxer battling racism in the 1967 play The Great White Hope and was “hailed as the most exciting presence in the American theater since Marlon Brando.” He reprised the role in the 1970 film and received his only Oscar nomination.
Over the next two decades, “Jones was in constant demand,” said The New York Times, appearing in films as varied as the romantic comedy Claudine (1974), the coal drama Matewan (1987), and the sports fantasy Field of Dreams (1989). Yet for being the voice of Darth Vader—the role that launched him into the pop culture stratosphere—Jones was paid only $7,000, and he initially asked not to be credited, characterizing his contribution as mere “special effects.” While Vader “didn’t exactly represent cinema’s most loving father,” said Rolling Stone, “paternal roles would become the linchpin of Jones’ work.” He played solemn royal patriarchs in The Lion King and in an acclaimed Shakespeare in the Park production of King Lear, as well as a goofy African monarch in the Eddie Murphy vehicles Coming to America (1998) and Coming 2 America (2021).
Yet “Jones was happiest onstage,” said The Washington Post. If his resume was “thick with commercials and phone-it-in movies,” that was to subsidize his relatively low-paid theater work. On Broadway he could afford to be more daring, playing Paul Robeson in a well-received one-man show and earning another Tony for his gut wrenching portrayal of a stern father in August Wilson’s Fences (1987). Jones “continued a punishing schedule of stage acting into his 80s,” said the Los Angeles Times, even as lung problems forced him to use an oxygen tank between acts. He refused to consider resting on his laurels. “The secret is never forgetting that you’re a journeyman actor,” he said in 2014, “and that nothing is your final thing, nothing is your greatest thing, nothing is your worst thing.”