James Earl Jones, who has died aged 93, was a massively accomplished and distinguished African American star of the stage and screen, an Egot titan and a great interpreter of classical and modern roles from Shakespeare to Eugene O’Neill and August Wilson. How he looked – magisterial, masculine, commanding – was of course a key to his success.
But it was how he sounded which made him a legend. That great rumbling basso profundo was like a thunderstorm surmounting the horizon, an almost supernatural voice of wisdom and power, which made generations of moviegoers from the 70s to the 90s tremble in the presence of a father figure, good and bad.
He was the voice of Darth Vader in the first Star Wars trilogy, informing Luke Skywalker of something intimately terrible – I’ll never forget that voice, delivering that devastating news – and then he was the voice of Mufasa, father of princeling cub Simba in the great Disney animation The Lion King, whose death is contrived by his evil brother Scar and for which Simba is made to feel wrongly, tragically guilty. Jones’s sonorous voice lent a dignity, and a kind of benign innocence to Mufasa’s speech explaining to wide-eyed Simba his royal responsibility to the great chain of being: “Everything you see exists together in a delicate balance. As king, you need to understand that balance and respect all the creatures, from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope … ”
That voice didn’t come out of nowhere. It was an adornment to Jones’s classical training and talent, and like Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte or Paul Robeson, he was an African American actor with a beautiful voice which was the key to his dignity and self-respect as a performer; it was how his characters rose above racism and cruelty.
In the flesh, Jones’s presence lent itself to roles in which wisdom coexisted with humility and something self-effacing – a paradox, considering what a mighty force he always was. Perhaps a quintessential late-period Jones performance, and something which matched the thoughtfulness and depth of his roles on stage, was his coalminer, “Few Clothes” Johnson, in John Sayles’s social realist drama Matewan (1987), about the 1920s strike in Matewan, West Virginia: a strong, clear moral presence. For Darrell Roodt’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1995), a new movie version of the Alan Paton novel, set in apartheid South Africa and produced to honour the new presidency of Nelson Mandela, Jones was the troubled clergyman Rev Stephen Kumalo who discovers his son has been arrested for killing a white man.
Jones’s movie debut was as Bombardier Zogg in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), piloting the plane that is to deliver the fatal payload: a younger man with a lighter, less assertive voice, of course, but with the gravitas in embryo for such an awful, ironic responsibility.
His first Oscar nomination (and Golden Globe best newcomer win) was for the role which was probably his most pugnaciously assertive: The Great White Hope (1970), which he had also played on Broadway, opposite Jane Alexander. Jones plays the all-conquering boxer Jack Jefferson (based on Jack Johnson) whose success infuriates racists who yearn for a “white hope” to defeat him in the ring, but realise that he can be defeated outside the ring by amplifying the supposed scandal of his relationship with a white woman. It was a fierce, sensual performance which was unlike the quietist calm of his later, more characteristic work, a role which fitted his real radical passion.
Jones was incidentally in the forefront of the authentic casting debate when he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972 to condemn Anthony Quinn’s plans to play the Haitian emperor Henri Christophe, in blackface – Jones’s objection, though moderately expressed, caused so much furore that Quinn was forced to abandon the project and lose his personal investment of half a million dollars.
Jones engaged with the blaxploitation mood of indie cinema with John Berry’s musical comedy Claudine (1974), which also got him a Golden Globe nomination. He plays Roop Marshall, a garbage collector who falls in love with Claudine, played by Diahann Carroll, a single mother of six living on welfare. Her children, and perhaps the audience, might suspect that Roop – a good-natured but somewhat baffled man who has not quite acknowledged his existing domestic responsibilities – is effectively going to be her seventh dependent.
In Phil Alden Robinson’s baseball classic Field Of Dreams (1989), Jones is the Salinger-esque reclusive author Terence Mann, who is persuaded to attend a game. In the Jack Ryan movies, he played another granite authority figure: Admiral James Greer. Comedy was not exactly Jones’s forte, but he deadpanned the role of the King of Zamunda, father of Eddie Murphy’s Prince in Coming to America in 1988. He also brought some fatherly and grandfatherly fun to the coming-of-age comedy The Sandlot (1993), inspired a little by Field Of Dreams, in which he plays another reclusive grouch of whom local kids are nervous.
And above or below all these successes are his “voice of God” moments – silly perhaps, but indicative of his relish for performance, his instant connection with audiences, who found it natural to love and respect him. James Earl Jones was movie royalty.