James Earl Jones, Seen and Remembered

Both roles are fathers to movie-franchise heroes, the evil Darth Vader, who aims to recruit his son, Luke, to the dark side of the Force in the Star Wars series, and the benevolent King Mufasa, who becomes a spiritual guide to Simba in the Lion King films. Both George Lucas and Disney harnessed a voice that “seemed to be calling from the depths of the sea,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek, and for the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, that “great rumbling basso profundo was like a thunderstorm surmounting the horizon, an almost supernatural voice of wisdom and power.” And at Slate, Nadira Goffe writes: “I have to believe Jones’s voice is the same timbre as the first note in existence: booming, rich, resolute.”

Abandoned by his own father not long after he was born, and then by his mother just a few years later, Jones developed a stutter so severe that he refused to speak until a high-school teacher encouraged him to read the poems he’d written in front of the class. When he told the grandfather he called Papa that he wanted to become an actor, he was met with a smack on the head. So he studied medicine for a while before serving in the military for a few years. While waiting for orders, he worked as a stagehand at a Michigan theater, where he landed a few roles, and eventually, he moved to New York.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Jones’s path to Broadway and Shakespeare was swift. “And audiences were mesmerized by the voice,” writes Robert D. McFadden in the New York Times. “It was Lear’s roaring crash into madness, Othello’s sweet balm for Desdemona, Oberon’s last rapture for Titania, the queen of the fairies on a midsummer night. He liked to portray kings and generals, garbage men, and bricklayers; perform Shakespeare in Central Park and the works of August Wilson and Athol Fugard on Broadway. He could strut and court lecherously, erupt with rage, or melt tenderly.”

McFadden singles out a 1961 off-Broadway production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, whose cast also featured Maya Angelou, Cicely Tyson, Louis Gossett Jr., and Billy Dee Williams. Jones found the role of Deodatus Village, who claims to have murdered a white woman, so emotionally exhausting that he left and rejoined the company several times during a run that lasted three and a half years. “Through that role,” Jones told the Washington Post in 1967, “I came to realize 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.”

The Post’s Adam Bernstein points out that several of Jones’s “riveting stage performances—as a brutish husband in Athol Fugard’s anti-apartheid drama Boesman and Lena (1970) and as the simple-minded Lennie in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1974)—were united by a single thread: Jones’s compulsion to bring greater nuance and dignity to what he described as ‘elemental’ men, unsophisticated, even basic characters who confront universal problems of friendship, family, love and (thwarted) ambition.”

Success on and off Broadway naturally led to the movies. “Not many actors have the good fortune to make their big-screen debut in one of the greatest films of all time,” writes Noel Murray in the NYT. “Jones only appears in a handful of scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s grim nuclear war comedy Dr. Strangelove [1964], but he does a lot with those few minutes, playing a bombardier whose consummate professionalism leads him to follow the orders of any crackpot commander or incompetent politician who barks in his ear.”

Jones had won the first of his two Tonys—he was nominated for four—for his performance as a troubled boxer in Howard Sackler’s play The Great White Hope when he appeared in the 1970 adaptation directed by Martin Ritt. “That film,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, “which earned Jones his first and only Oscar nomination (the Academy presented him with an Honorary Award in 2012), opened up a film career that would span six decades, even if he was seldom given the leading-man opportunities that a white actor of his standing would have landed. His booming voice made him a natural for roles of authority, but he radiated strength even in silence. Jones could also modulate the powerful instrument that became his trademark to bring out warm, velvety textures in more avuncular parts, invariably showing great depth of feeling whether he was playing hubris or humility.”

He conveyed a bit of both as the first Black president of the United States in Joseph Sargent’s The Man (1972) and then took on the role of Rupert “Roop” Marshall, a garbage collector who falls in love with a single mother of six (Diahann Carroll) in John Berry’s Claudine (1974). Roop is “lithe and sinewy, walking on the balls of his feet with the slick gait of a cat daddy, but sturdier,” writes Danielle Amir Jackson. “Younger audiences most familiar with Jones’s roles in Coming to America (1988) and Cry, the Beloved Country (1995), or his voice work in the Star Wars and Lion King films, will be particularly disarmed by his presence here. Before his baritone became recognizable for its stentorian authority, before his frame took on the girth of a kind uncle’s, Jones’s turn as Carroll’s leading man revealed an earthy, magnetic sex appeal.”

As A. S. Hamrah points out, “Few Clothes” Johnson was one of a very few characters in John Sayles’s Matewan (1987) based on an actual person. In 1920, he was the leader of a group of Black miners brought in by the Stone Mountain Coal Company to break up a strike—but he wound up joining the union. MTV’s Michael Alex notes that in his book Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan, Sayles writes that he knew Jones would be perfect for the role, but he “couldn’t possibly afford him. In the end, he wrote him an apologetic letter, offering him union scale, uncomfortable housing, and a tough schedule. Jones got right back to him with a Yes.” Variety raved: “Jones’s performance practically glows in the dark.”

Jones plays a novelist who sees what Kevin Costner sees in Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams (1989), a film that Jonathan Rosenbaum dismissed as “well-made treacle,” but which has since become an irrefutable entry on any list of “dad movies.” Speaking of which, Jones plays Admiral James Greer in three adaptations of Tom Clancy novels, The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992), and Clear and Present Danger (1994). He has a small but delightfully played role as an NSA agent in Robinson’s Sneakers (1992), and in Charles Burnett’s recently revived The Annihilation of Fish (1999), he appears opposite Lynn Redgrave. She’s got an imaginary lover and he wrestles with an imaginary demon, and together, they “demonstrate a hilarious commitment to the pantomime required,” writes UCLA’s Shannon Kelley, “and a keen instinct for those moments when emotional need becomes the story’s compass.”

“It’s impossible to choose a favorite James Earl Jones performance,” writes Stephanie Zacharek, but she offers two strong contenders. Claudine’s Roop is one. The other is Jones’s “dual role as a scientist and a fever version of an African shaman in John Boorman’s wackadoodle Exorcist II: The Heretic, from 1977. Though people hooted at The Heretic upon its release, its cracked genius has since been reappraised. And Jones is astonishing. He appears in a dream sequence—or is it reality?—glowering from beneath an elaborate locust headdress, a golden-tinged helmet adorned with quivering antennae and huge, jewellike, all-seeing eyes. In this outlandish headgear, he not only holds your attention, he locks you in his dream. You want to laugh, but you can’t. That’s what a great character actor can do, and sometimes it’s everything.”