James Earl Jones has died aged 93

His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed that Jones died Monday morning at his home in the Hudson Valley region of New York. The cause was not immediately clear.

Pioneering Jones, who in 1965 became one of the first African-American actors in a recurring role on a daytime drama (“As the World Turns”) and worked into his 80s, won two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe, two Tony Awards, a Grammy, National Medal of Arts and Kennedy Center Honors. He also received an honorary Oscar and a special Tony for lifetime achievement. In 2022, a theater on Broadway was renamed in his honor.

He cut an elegant figure late in life, with a wry sense of humor and a ferocious work habit. In 2015, he arrived at rehearsals for a Broadway production of “The Gin Game” with the play already memorized and notebooks full of comments from the creative team. He said he was always in the service of the work.

“The need to tell stories has always been with us,” he told The Associated Press at the time. “I think it happened the first time around the campfires, when the man came home and told his family he got the bear, the bear didn’t get him.”

Jones created such memorable film roles as the reclusive writer returned to the spotlight in “Field of Dreams,” boxer Jack Johnson in the stage and screen hit “The Great White Hope,” writer Alex Haley in “Roots: The Next Generation”. ” and a South African minister in “Cry, the Loved Country”.

He was also a sought-after voice actor, voicing the malevolence of Darth Vader (“No, I am your father”, usually misremembered as “Luke, I am your father”) as well as the benign dignity of King Mufasa in both the 1994 and 2019 versions of Disney’s “The Lion King” and announcing “This is CNN” during station breaks. He won a Grammy in 1977 for his performance on the audiobook “Great American Documents.”

“If you were an actor or aspired to be an actor, if you hit the streets looking for work, one of the standards we always had was to be James Earl Jones,” Samuel L once said . Jackson.

Some of his other films include ‘Dr. Strangelove’, ‘The Greatest’ (with Muhammad Ali), ‘Conan the Barbarian’, ‘Three Fugitives’ and playing an admiral in three blockbuster Tom Clancy adaptations – ‘The Hunt for Red October’, ‘Patriot Games’ and ‘Clear and Present danger.” In a rare romantic comedy, “Claudine,” Jones had an on-screen romance with Diahann Carroll.

Jones made his Broadway debut in 1958’s “Sunrise At Campobello” and would go on to win two Tony Awards for “The Great White Hope” (1969) and “Fences” (1987). He was also nominated for “On Golden Pond” (2005) and “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” (2012). He was celebrated for mastering Shakespeare and Athol Fugard alike. More recent Broadway appearances include “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “The Iceman Cometh” and “You Can’t Take It With You.”

As a rising stage and television actor, he has performed with the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater in “Othello,” “Macbeth” and “King Lear” and in plays on Broadway.

Jones was born by the light of an oil lamp in a shack in Arkabutla, Mississippi on January 17, 1931. His father, Robert Earl Jones, had left his wife before the child’s arrival to pursue a life as a boxer and later an actor.

When Jones was 6, his mother took him to her parents’ farm near Manistee, Michigan. His grandparents adopted the boy and raised him.

“A world ended for me, the safe world of childhood,” Jones wrote in his autobiography, “Voices and Silences.” “Moving from Mississippi to Michigan was supposed to be a glorious event. It was heartbreaking for me and it wasn’t long before I started stuttering.”

Too embarrassed to speak, he remained virtually mute for years, communicating with teachers and classmates with handwritten notes. A sympathetic high school teacher, Donald Crouch, learned that the boy wrote poetry and asked Jones to read one of his poems aloud in class. He did it without fail.

The teacher and student worked together to restore the boy’s normal speech. “I was never tired of talking, debating, talking – playing,” he recalled in his book.

At the University of Michigan, he failed a pre-med exam and majored in theater, also playing four seasons of basketball. He served in the army from 1953 to 1955.

In New York, he moved with his father and enrolled in the American Theater Wing program for young actors. Father and son waxed floors to support themselves while looking for acting jobs.

Real stardom suddenly emerged in 1970 with “The Great White Hope.” Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play on Broadway depicted the struggles of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion, amid racism in early 20th-century America. In 1972, Jones reprized his role in the film version and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Jones’ two wives were also actors. He married Julienne Marie Hendricks in 1967. After their divorce, he married Cecilia Hart, best known for her role as Stacey Erickson on the CBS police drama “Paris,” in 1982. (She died in 2016.) They had a son, Flynn. Earl, born 1983.

In 2022, Broadway’s Cort Theater was renamed after Jones, with a ceremony that included Norm Lewis singing “Go the Distance,” Brian Stokes Mitchell singing “Make Them Hear You,” and words from Mayor Eric Adams, Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson Jackson.

“You can’t think of an artist who has served America more,” director Kenny Leon told the AP. “It seems like a small act, but it’s a huge action. It’s something we can look at and see that it’s tangible.”

Citing his stutter as one of the reasons he wasn’t a political activist, Jones still hoped his art could change people’s minds.

“I realized early on, from people like Athol Fugard, that you can’t change anybody’s mind no matter what you do,” he told the AP. “As a preacher, as a scholar, you cannot change their minds. But you can change the way they feel.”