James Earl Jones

James Earl Jones was born on the seventeenth of January 1931 at the Arkabutla tobacco-farm of his grandfather John Henry Connolly in Tate County, Mississippi, the only son of Robert Earl Jones — a sharecropper, prize-fighter and aspiring actor — and Ruth Williams, a teacher. His parents separated before his birth. He was raised by his maternal grandparents on the Connolly family farm and from his fifth year at his grandparents' subsequent move to Manistee County, Michigan. The 1936 migration produced in him a severe stammer that he carried until his fourteenth year.

He attended high school at the Brethren Public Schools in northwestern Michigan, where his English teacher Donald Crouch — a former colleague of Robert Frost — required the stammering Jones to recite poetry to the class on the theory that the rhythm of memorised verse would carry him through the stammer. The technique worked. He took the bachelor's at the University of Michigan in 1953 — initially in pre-medical studies, transferring to dramatic literature in his junior year — and served four years in the United States Army as an Army Ranger and infantry officer in the Korean theatre.

He moved to New York in 1957 and studied at the American Theatre Wing under Lee Strasberg. He took his first professional role in 1957 in the off-Broadway production of Sunrise at Campobello. He played the title role in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of Othello in 1964 and made his Broadway debut the same year in The Blacks. His decisive Broadway role was Jack Jefferson — the boxer character based on Jack Johnson (placed in this archive) — in Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope. The role won him the 1969 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play and the 1971 Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role for the film adaptation.

He played King Lear at the Delacorte Theater in 1973, recorded the voice of Darth Vader in George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) — in which he was credited only at his subsequent insistence on the 1980 sequel — Othello in 1981 opposite Christopher Plummer at the Newhouse Theater and Christopher Walken at the Public, and won a second Tony in 1987 for Fences. He played Mufasa in The Lion King (1994) and Darth Vader through the Star Wars prequel and sequel trilogies into 2019.

He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2002, an honorary Academy Award in 2011 and the Tony Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017. He died at Pawling, New York, on the ninth of September 2024, at ninety-three.

He is honored here as the foremost Black classical stage actor of the post-war American theatre.