James Earl Jones, acclaimed actor and voice of Darth Vader, dies at 93 | Entertainment News

In Voices and Silences, his 1993 autobiography, Jones wrote that voicing Darth Vader enabled him to get work in advertising and voice-over work. He admitted that he had made many mediocre films to help “subsidize” his work in the theater, where, he said, “there’s not much money to be made, even on Broadway.”

He won a Tony Award for Best Actor for his role as boxer Jack Jefferson in The Great White Hope, which was released in 1968, a role he reprised in the 1970 film version and which earned him an Academy Award nomination. He starred in 20 other Broadway plays, from Othello to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and played Chauffeuring Miss Daisy in London’s West End and on Broadway.

An actor’s job on stage “is to fill the entire space with sound, movement, emotion, animal presence and energy,” Jones wrote in his memoir. The opposite works better on film, he said, where acting must be subtle and suggestive.

Television work

On 1960s television, he was a doctor in Dr. Kildare, a detective in The Defenders, and a tribal chief in Tarzan.

He played a senator who becomes America’s first black president in The Man, a 1972 television movie that anticipated the real event 36 years earlier.

Jones appeared in advertisements for some Bell Atlantic Corp. units in the late 1980s and became the company’s marketing spokesman in the mid-1990s. When Bell Atlantic and GTE Corp. merged in 2000 to form Verizon Communications Inc., he became the public face of the new company.

Jones won a second Tony for her role in the 1987 Broadway production of August Wilson’s Fences. She received the National Medal of Arts and a Tony Award for lifetime achievement.

Born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, on January 17, 1931, Jones was the son of Robert Earl Jones and Ruth Connolly, two teenagers. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Maggie Anderson Connolly and John Henry Connolly, whom he called Mom and Dad.

Jones attributed his stuttering to two traumatic events that happened early in his life. At age 4, when his grandparents moved to Michigan, they tried to leave him with his mother. When he became nearly hysterical, they relented and took him away.

Upon arriving in Dublin, Michigan, the children at the town’s one-room school made fun of his Southern accent so much that he became paralyzed.

“For about eight years, from when I was 6 until I was 14, I was virtually mute,” he wrote.

One day, when he was in high school, he stopped stuttering. A teacher had him recite a poem he had written to prove it was an original work and that he hadn’t copied it. “And so, little by little, I began to regain my ability to speak,” Jones said.

Father and son

He soon grew tired of debating, speaking, and acting in high school. When he entered the University of Michigan in 1949, he knew he wanted to be an actor.

It was around this time that he met his father for the first time. Robert Earl Jones, Joe Louis’s former training partner, had taken up acting and invited his son to visit him in New York, where he had appeared in some plays.

They went to the theatre together and spent hours discussing Shakespeare’s Othello, a role the son subsequently played many times but which always eluded his father.

Young Jones followed a U.S. Army officer training course while studying at the University of Michigan, then entered active duty as a second lieutenant in 1953 without graduating.

After completing his military service, Jones turned to acting. He worked in summer productions in Michigan before moving to New York, where he took acting classes and stayed with his father before moving into his own apartment.

“Six months at my father’s house in New York were not going to make up for those 21 years of absence,” she wrote.

His initial weakness — a voice limited by a stutter — became his strength and trademark through constant exercise, he said. His speech teacher in those early years, Nora Dunfee, remained his voice coach for much of his career.

In 1963, Newsweek called Jones a “dynamo” on the stage, but he was struggling financially.

Then, as Jones said, lightning struck twice. First, when he was cast as Jack Jefferson, inspired by real-life heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, in The Great White Hope.

“I knew immediately that this was a role I had to play,” he wrote.

Lose weight

Not that the role was easy. Jones, who had never been an athlete, said the training was “far worse than anything the Army ever put me through, even Ranger training.”

He would rise early to run three miles a day with a former boxer, then spend two hours in a gym jumping rope and punching a body bag. Nearly 37 years before he tackled the play, his preparation had him packing on muscle as he lost 25 pounds.

Before the play’s premiere on October 3, 1968, Jones was a respected but not very well-known actor. After the premiere, his career reached a new level.

“If anyone deserves to become that occasional star, an overnight star, then Mr. Jones deserves no less,” wrote Clive Barnes, who reviewed the play for the New York Times.

Jones was nominated for an Oscar when Great White Hope was made into a film in 1970, although he was disappointed with the film.

Jones said he felt “extraordinarily blessed” for the second time when he was cast in Fences. After a year on the play, Jones quit, saying he no longer had the energy to endure long theater performances. Instead, he did more television and movies.

With his wife, Cecilia Hart, he had a son, Flynn Earl Jones, who died in 2016. He was divorced from his first wife, Julienne Marie, an American actress.