Today, James Earl Jones is synonymous with Darth Vader. The actor, who died at age 93, imbued in the fallen Jedi Knight a wonderfully pantomime quality. He was a baddie you wanted to boo but whom you could never quite bring yourself to hate. Yet Jones almost missed out on the job entirely, with Lucas seriously considering hiring Citizen Kane director Orson Wells instead – all while Prowse, back in London, thought he was going to be both the vocal and physical embodiment of Vader.
Prowse, Welles, Jones – this bizarre dub triangle understandably gave Lucas a Death Star-sized headache. Prowse would never have worked, and his exclusion led to a breakdown in his relationship with his director that, decades later, resulted in Lucas barring him from official Star Wars fan events. Lucas was, however, genuinely torn between Welles and Earl-Jones.
The idea of a movie-making icon such as Welles slipping into a recording booth to blather on about “The Force” and “Rebel Spies” might seem absurd today. What next – Stanley Kubrick playing a Cylon in Battlestar: Galactica? Richard Attenborough…Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle? But in the Seventies, Welles’s glory days were a long way behind and he was living from paycheque to paycheque in the hope of financing his passion project, The Other Side of The Wind (posthumously released by Netflix in 2018).