You can’t think of James Earl Jones without hearing his voice.
That booming basso profundo, conveying instant dignity or menace, was Jones’ signature instrument. It brought power to all his stage and movie roles, most indelibly as Darth Vader in “Star Wars,” Mufasa in “The Lion King and as the voice of CNN.
That remarkable voice is just one of many things the world will miss about the beloved actor, who died Monday, according to his agent. He was 93.
Jones had a distinguished career that spanned some 60 years and took him from a small-town theater in northern Michigan to the highest reaches of Hollywood, where he appeared in dozens of movies and TV series. (He also lent his voice to CNN’s tagline, “Thisis CNN,” complete with a dramatic pause after “This …”)
Voicing Darth Vader
In the mid-1970s “Star Wars” creator George Lucas cast towering British actor David Prowse as the guy inside Darth Vader’s black suit, but decided he wanted someone else to voice the character.
“George thought he wanted a – pardon the expression – darker voice,” Jones once told the American Film Institute. “I lucked out.”
Back then nobody imagined “Star Wars” would become a blockbuster, let alone an enduring franchise and cultural phenomenon. Jones recorded all his lines in a few hours and was not listed in the film’s credits. He said he was paid just $7,000 for the movie, “and I thought that was good money.”
The actor and Lucas had disagreements about how he should voice the villainous Vader.
“I wanted to make Darth Vader more interesting, more subtle, more psychologically oriented,” Jones said. “He (Lucas) said, ‘No, no … you’ve got to keep his voice on a very narrow band of inflection, ‘cause he ain’t human.”
Darth Vader’s climactic duel with Luke Skywalker in 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back” became a dramatic high point in the “Star Wars” series – punctuated by Jones’ delivery of one of the most famous lines in movie history: “No,Iam your father!”
Jones said that almost two decades later, when he was voicing the dignified Mufasa for Disney’s animated “The Lion King,” it took him a while to strike the right tone.
“My first mistake was to try and make him regal,” Jones said of the 1994 film. “And what they really needed was something more like me. “They said, ‘What are you like as a father?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m really a dopey dad.’
“And so they began to impose my facial expressions onto Mufasa, and a different tone of voice. Yeah, he was authoritative, but he was just a gentle dad.”
A prolific career
Jones was born in 1931 in Mississippi. His father, Robert Earl Jones, left the family before James was born to become an actor in New York and Hollywood, working with playwright Langston Hughes and eventually earning supporting roles in hit movies including “The Sting.”
Jones’ family moved from Mississippi to Michigan when he was 5, a traumatic upheaval that caused him to develop a stutter. His fear of speaking rendered him almost mute until he got to high school, where a poetry teacher helped him overcome his disability by encouraging him to read his poems aloud.
“He began to challenge me, to nudge me toward speaking again … toward acknowledging and appreciating the beauty of words,” Jones said.
Jones studied drama at the University of Michigan, served as an Army Ranger and then moved to New York, where he soon landed lead roles in Shakespearean stage productions. He made his film debut in 1964 as a bombardier in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.”
In 1967 Jones was cast as troubled boxer Jack Johnson in a theatrical production of “The Great White Hope,” a career-changing role that won him a Tony. He reprised the role three years later in the film adaptation, becoming only the second African American man, after Sidney Poitier, to be nominated for an Academy Award.
By the mid-1970s Jones was working steadily in movies and TV – a prolific run that never slowed. Over the next five decades he appeared in many memorable roles: As Alex Haley in TV’s “Roots:The Next Generations,” warlord Thulsa Doom in “Conan the Barbarian,” an African king in “Coming to America,” Kevin Costner’s reluctant recruit in “Field of Dreams,” Admiral Greer in “The Hunt for Red October” and “Patriot Games” and a South African preacher in “Cry, the Beloved Country.”
The power of speech
In 2019 he again voiced Mufasa in Disney’s remake of “The Lion King,” becoming the only cast member to reprise his role from the first film.
Over the years he also guest-starred in dozens of TV series, from “L.A. Law” to “Sesame Street,” appeared regularly on the stage and lent his deep, rumbling voice to everything from “The Simpsons” to a popular audio recording of the King James version of the Bible.
Jones said people in public sometimes didn’t recognize him until they heard his voice.
“When you don’t talk it’s like going ninja,” he told Rachael Ray in 2016. “You get in the taxi and say where you’re going and the guy turns around and says, ‘Hey, aren’t you that Darth Vader guy?’”
Over his long and prolific career Jones won three Tonys, two Emmys, a Grammy, a Golden Globe and numerous other awards.
“It wasn’t acting. It was language. It was speech,” he said when asked what aroused his passion for acting. “It was the thing that I’d … denied myself all those years (as a boy). I now had a great — an abnormal — appreciation for it.
“And it was the idea that you can do a play — like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever — and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life,” he told the Academy of Achievement in 1996.
“You could say these things! That’s what it’s still about, whether it’s the movies or TV or what. That what it’s still about.”
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