James Earl Jones was an accomplished actor on stage and on screen with a distinct baritone voice that was often featured in voiceover roles. Jones passed away in September 2024 after a career that spanned over six decades. Today’s episode of Sounds of Cinema took a look back at Jones’ career.
According to Variety, Jones struggled with a stutter when he was a child which he overcame by reading his poetry aloud to his high school class. He began acting onstage with a small part in the 1957 off-Broadway production Wedding in Japan. He was the first Black actor to have a continuing character on a daytime soap opera with his role on As the World Turns. Jones’ first feature film role was as Lt. Lothar Zogg in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
One of Jones’ signature roles was the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars. The character was created through a group effort. In the original trilogy, David Prowse played him in the suit, Bob Anderson did a lot of the fighting, and Sebastian Shaw played the unmasked Anakin Skywalker seen in Return of the Jedi. Many actors played the physical part of the role in subsequent movies and TV shows but James Earl Jones’ voice was the constant. Jones was so identified with Darth Vader that Disney and Lucasfilm made a deal with Jones to recreate his voice with archival recordings and AI technology in future Star Wars stories.
Another significant villain role in James Earl Jones’ career was Thulsa Doom in 1982’s Conan the Barbarian. Although Jones is not in the film very much his presence is felt throughout it. What could be a stock comic book villain is elevated to something much more interesting partly by the writing and partly by the gravitas Jones brought to the character.
A lot of us know James Earl Jones from fantasy films like Star Wars but he also had a lot of interesting roles in dramatic films quite often dealing with Black history. One of his signature roles was the lead in The Great White Hope in which he played a fictionalized version of real life boxer Jack Johnson. Jones had played the role on stage and later in the 1970 film version, which was Jones’ only Academy Award nomination.
Jones also played Malcolm X in 1977’s The Greatest and author Alex Haley in 1979’s Roots: The Next Generations. He had a role in the 1987 TV miniseries Heat Wave which was a dramatization of the 1965 Watts riots. Jones had a lead role in John Sayles’ 1987 film Matawan which dramatized a 1920s coal miner strike in West Virginia. Jones also had a lead role in the 1995 South Africa apartheid drama Cry, the Beloved Country.
James Earl Jones was known as a dramatic actor but he had a gift for comedy and also projected a masculine tenderness. One of the best examples of that is his role as King Joffer in Coming to America in which he starred with Eddie Murphy. Jones’ comedic talents were also seen in his role as Terence Mann Field of Dreams. This has become one of the most popular titles in Jones’ filmography and he gets many of the best lines in the movie.
In addition to his dramatic roles and his place in fantasy films such as Star Wars and Conan the Barbarian, James Earl Jones also had a significant place in the childhoods of ’90s kids. That was partly due to voicing Darth Vader but also because of his brief but memorable role in 1993’s The Sandlot and especially his role as Mufasa in Disney’s The Lion King. Jones voiced the character in the 1994 original and reprised that role in the 2019 remake.
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