As a child, he didn’t speak for years because of a chronic stutter. When he did, no one would have thought his voice would boom across fictional galaxies, striking awe in all as the tyrannical head of a force in space. Few also might have expected the glow they experienced from listening to his sagely words as the king of an animated animal kingdom.
James Earl Jones, who became one of Broadway and Hollywood’s most adored and respected names over 70 years, once lived in a $19-a-month cold-water flat and worked as a carpenter to get closer to the stage that would launch his career.
It was a long and hard struggle that culminated in him starring in a plethora of plays, nearly 90 television network dramas and episodic series as well as some 120 movies. In the end, he had played almost everything to everyone. He was Shakespeare’s King Lear. He was a humorous African king and father to Eddie Murphy in Coming to America. He was a senior naval officer to Alec Baldwin in The Hunt For Red October and director of intelligence to Harrison Ford in Patriot Games.
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But it was also his voice that people fell in love with.
Without him, many couldn’t imagine the gravelly strains of the evil Darth Vader in Star Wars — the most successful space movie franchise which tells of another galaxy in “a long time ago”, populated by numerous aliens and other creatures and robots, as well as human-looking characters.
Without Jones, Musafa — the head of the animal kingdom in the Disney animation film Lion King — might also be unthinkable.
And it wasn’t only on the stage or in movies. Those who tuned into their TV to watch the news on CNN would hear Jones’ booming voice multiple times during the day, reminding them that “This Is CNN”.
In the process, Jones became the only known person to win the entire ‘EGOT’ range of awards — an Emmy for television, Grammy for music, Oscar for movies and Tony for stage.
“James Earl Jones… there will never be another of his particular combination of graces,” LeVar Burton, an iconic American actor himself who starred in African slave drama Roots, wrote on the X platform, where a multitude of celebrities to politicians and everyday people paid tribute to the legend who passed on Sept 9, 2024, at the age of 93.
As Robert McFadden, who has written for the New York Times for 63 years himself recalled, Jones’ voice was “a rolling thunder that plumbed America’s race relations, Shakespeare’s rhapsodic tragedies and became the faceless menace of [the masked] Darth Vader”.
McFadden describes Jones as “a bear of a man”, who at 6 feet 2 inches and 200 pounds, dominated the space he performed in with “his barrel chest, large head and emotional fires, tromping across the boards and spitting his lines into the front rows.”
And audiences were mesmerized by the voice, be it Lear’s roaring crash into madness, Othello’s sweet balm for Desdemona or Oberon’s last rapture for Titania, the queen of the fairies on a midsummer night (all Shakesperen lore).
“He liked to portray kings and generals, garbage men and bricklayers; perform Shakespeare in Central Park and the works of August Wilson and Athol Fugard on Broadway,” McFadde said, adding:
“He could strut and court lecherously, erupt with rage or melt tenderly; play the blustering Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (2008) or an aging Norman Thayer Jr. in Ernest Thompson’s confrontation with mortality, “On Golden Pond” (2005).”
Born in Arkabutla, Mississippi on Jan. 17, 1931, to Robert Earl and Ruth (Connolly) Jones, he was abandoned by the time he was six by a father who left the family to chase prizefighting and acting dreams and a mother frequently absent after remarrying. Jones was raised by his maternal grandparents, John and Maggie Connolly, The grandmother was, particularly bigoted, blaming all white people for slavery, and Native American and Black people “for allowing it to happen”. A child already emotionally wounded without the love of biological parents, he was further traumatized by his grandmother’s fire-and-brimstone speak. The boy began stuttering.
By the time he was 8, his speech had gotten so bad that he stopped talking altogether, terrified that only gibberish would come out. In a one-room rural school he attended, he communicated by writing notes. Friendless, lonely, self-conscious and depressed, he endured years of silence and isolation.
In high school, things began to change. An English teacher, Donald Crouch, began to help him after discovering Jones’ love for poetry. He encouraged him to write and stand before the class and read his lines. Gaining confidence, James recited a poem a day in class. The speech impediment subsided and he joined a debating team and entered oratorical contests. By graduation, in 1949, he had largely overcome his disability, although the effects lingered and never quite went away.
Years later, Jones said learning to control his stutter was what made him an actor. He would deliberately pause midway of a sentence to control his delivery. Audiences loved that, thinking he was pausing for effect because of the added dramatization that such gaps provided, along with his expressions.
- From Robert McFadden’s tribute on James Earl Jones in The New York Times and other sources.
