James Earl Jones, the actor whose beautifully sonorous tones gave voice to Star Wars’ principal villain Darth Vader, has died aged 93.
Jones died at his home in Dutchess county, New York, according to an announcement from his representatives. No cause of death was provided.
Jones was not the original choice for the role of Vader: the British bodybuilder David Prowse was cast in the first film, released in 1977, for his imposing physique, but the film’s director George Lucas was unhappy with Prowse’s pronounced West Country accent. Jones was given the job of revoicing Vader’s menacing dialogue, creating an instantly immortal evildoer in the process. Hardly a major name at the time, Jones considered himself “special effects” and was not credited until the third Star Wars movie, The Return of the Jedi, in 1983. In all, Jones’s voice would be heard in six Star Wars films – the original trilogy, plus The Revenge of the Sith in 2005, Rogue One in 2016 and The Rise of Skywalker in 2019 – as well as the infamous 1978 Holiday Special and the Star Wars: Rebels TV series which ran between 2014 and 2018.
Jones also had great success with another voice-only role: Mufasa in the 1994 Disney animation The Lion King, whose death at the hands of his villainous brother Scar arguably traumatised a generation of children to the same extent as the death of Bambi’s mother in the 1960s. Jones reprised his role in the 2019 remake directed by Jon Favreau, which tried to give a more authentic cultural flavour to the story.
By this time, Jones had already won considerable renown, and a substantial career, as a stage actor. Born in Mississippi in 1931, Jones grew up in Michigan after his family moved there during the Great Migration. Jones’s father was actor Robert Earl Jones, although he abandoned his family before Jones was born, and they had little contact until the 1950s. (Jones senior acted in Langston Hughes’s play Don’t You Want to be Free?, a string of films by African American film pioneer Oscar Micheaux, and a number of high-profile Hollywood films including The Sting, as grifter Luther Coleman.)
Jones was affected by a stammer as a child, which he overcame with the help of a teacher. After studying drama at the University of Michigan and a spell in the military after the Korean war, Jones quickly established himself a stage performer, making his Broadway debut in 1958 with a small role in Sunrise at Campobello, Dore Schary’s play about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s polio diagnosis.
Jones would perform in a series of major productions in the 1960s, including Jean Genet’s The Blacks, Bertolt Brecht’s Baal and Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death. Jones also appeared in a string of Shakespeare plays on Broadway, among them The Merchant of Venice, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale and – most famously – Othello in 1964, a role he would play again in 1982. At the same time, Jones began to find work on screen: his film debut was as airman Lothar Zogg in Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear war satire Dr Strangelove.
In 1967, Jones earned arguably his defining role on the stage: boxer Jack Jefferson, modelled on real-life great Jack Johnson, in Howard Sackler’s play The Great White Hope. Jones won a Tony award for best actor in 1969, and then went on to star in the 1970 film adaptation, directed by Martin Ritt; he received an Oscar nomination for best actor, the second black actor to be nominated for the award. The film gave Jones a platform as a leading man in Hollywood, and he was able to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded to African American actors at the time. He appeared in The Man, as a senator who becomes the first black president, and in Claudine, a romantic comedy opposite Diahann Carroll (who was nominated for the best actress Oscar for her role).
Star Wars and its sequels solidified Jones’s presence in mainstream cinema, and he benefited from a regular stream of supporting roles in big films, becoming one of the most high-profile black American actors of the 1980s and 90s. He played the villainous Thulsa Doom opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian, Eddie Murphy’s father in Coming to America, author Terence Mann in Field of Dreams, and the CIA deputy director in The Hunt for Red October.
Jones continued to appear on stage whenever possible: he starred in the premiere production of August Wilson’s Fences, winning a second Tony award in 1987 for his role as refuse collector Troy Maxson, and as chauffeur Hoke Colburn in the 2010 touring revival of Driving Miss Daisy. In 2013 he played Benedick opposite Vanessa Redgrave’s Beatrice in a Mark Rylance directed production of Much Ado About Nothing.
Jones was married twice: to the actor and singer Julienne Marie between 1968 and 1972, and to Cecilia Hart, who died in 2016. He is survived by his son Flynn, also an actor.