James Earl Jones, the EGOT-winning actor known for voicing Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise for four decades, has died at age 93.
The son of actor and boxer Robert Earl Jones, James Earl Jones was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi on January 17th, 1931. His father left the family shortly after his birth, and Jones was raised by his maternal grandparents in Michigan from the age of five. Jones found the transition to living with his grandparents so traumatic that he developed a stutter and spent his time in school mute. He credited his high school English teacher, Donald Crouch, for helping him with his stutter; Crouch discovered Jones had a talent for poetry, and encouraged him to read his work aloud in class.
After graduating high school in 1949, Jones attended the University of Michigan, where he was originally pre-med before turning his attention to acting. While in college, he joined the Reserve Officer Training Program, and later served in the Army shortly after the Korean War. He was promoted to first lieutenant before his discharge.
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Following his Army service, Jones moved to New York City, where he studied at the American Theatre Wing. In 1957, he made his Broadway debut as the understudy to Lloyd Richards in a 1957 production of The Egghead. In the ’60s, Jones turned to Shakespeare, performing in productions of Othello, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, and Hamlet. His film debut came in 1964 with Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
In 1967, Jones starred alongside Jane Alexander in a Washington, D.C. production of Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope. The play won a Pulitzer Prize for drama, and Jones won his first Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play — leading to his first leading role in a film, when the play was adapted into a movie of the same name. For the film adaptation, Jones was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, making him the second Black man after Sidney Poitier to receive the nomination.
In 1974, Jones and Diahann Carroll starred in Claudine, the story of a Black single mother raising six children. The film was one of the first major movies to center a Black relationship and portray economic inequality, and earned both actors a Golden Globe nomination.
Jones debuted one of his most iconic roles in 1977, when he voiced Darth Vader in Star Wars: A New Hope, though he wasn’t officially credited for the role until the third Star Wars film, 1983’s Return of the Jedi. As he explained in a 2008 interview, “When Linda Blair did the girl in The Exorcist, they hired Mercedes McCambridge to do the voice of the devil coming out of her. And there was controversy as to whether Mercedes should get credit. I was one who thought no, she was just special effects. So when it came to Darth Vader, I said, no, I’m just special effects. But it became so identified that by the third one, I thought, OK I’ll let them put my name on it.”
Jones voiced Darth Vader in every Star Wars film for the next four decades and also appeared in some of the franchise’s numerous television spin offs before abdicating his throne to AI technology in 2022. His last contribution to the franchise came in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker.
The same year that he debuted as Darth Vader, Jones won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Great American Documents, where he read Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. He won his second Tony Award for 1987’s Fences, which depicted a Black working class family struggling to survive in the 1950s.
Jones appeared in a number of films in the 1980s and ’90s, including Conan the Barbarian, Coming to America, Field of Dreams, The Hunt for Red October, The Sandlot, Clear and Present Danger, and Cry, the Beloved Country. In 1994, he voiced Mufasa in Disney’s The Lion King.
He turned to television in the ’90s, and won two Emmys in 1991: one for Best Actor for Gabriel’s Fire, and one for Best Supporting Actor in Heat Wave. In a series of guest star roles, Jones lent his voice to The Simpsons and appeared in hit series like Law and Order, Will & Grace, and Frasier. In 1998, he began hosting An American Moment following the death of Charles Kuralt.
Jones continued to guest star on television shows and lend his iconic bass voice to huge programs in the 2000s. He appeared on Two and a Half Men, House, and The Big Bang Theory, and provided the voiceover for CNN’s “This Is CNN” tagline and NBC’s coverage of the 2000 and 2004 Olympics. Returning to theater, Jones starred in an all-Black Broadway production of On Golden Pond in 2005, and appeared in a similar production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2008.
In 2010, Jones starred alongside Vanessa Redgrave in a Broadway production of Driving Miss Daisy. The next year, while performing the show on London’s West End, he was awarded an honorary Oscar by Ben Kingsley. Then, in 2013, Jones and Angela Lansbury took the show on the road in Australia. Jones appeared in a number of other plays throughout the 2010s, including The Gin Game, Much Ado About Nothing, You Can’t Take It With You, and The Best Man — the latter of which he was nominated for another Tony.
In 2019, Jones reprised his role of Mufasa in Jon Favreau’s CGI remake of The Lion King. That same year, he did his last organic voice work for the Star Wars franchise for The Rise of Skywalker. In 2021, he reprised the role of King Jaffe Joffer in Coming 2 America.
In addition to winning an award in each of the four main performing arts categories, Jones was honored with a National Medal of the Arts by President George H.W. Bush in 1992, while he received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2002. Jones has also received the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, an Honorary Doctor of Arts from Harvard University, and a Tony Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2022, the Cort Theatre, a Broadway theater in Manhattan, was renamed the James Earl Jones Theatre in his honor.
