Award-winning actor had voice that could menace or melt
Earl Jones, a stuttering farm child who became a voice of rolling thunder as one of America’s most versatile actors in a stage, film and television career that plumbed race relations, Shakespeare’s rhapsodic tragedies and the faceless menace of Darth Vader, died Monday at his home in Dutchess County, New York. He was 93.
The office of his agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed the death in a statement.
From destitute days working in a diner and living in a $19-a-month cold-water flat, Jones climbed to Broadway and Hollywood stardom with talent, drive and remarkable vocal cords. He was abandoned as a child by his parents, raised by a racist grandmother and mute for years in his stutterer’s shame, but he learned to speak again with a herculean will. All had much to do with his success.
So did plays by Howard Sackler and August Wilson that let a young actor explore racial hatred in the national experience; television soap operas that boldmated ly cast a Black man as a doctor in the 1960s; and a decision by George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars,” to put an anonymous, rumbling African American voice behind the grotesque mask of the galactic villain Vader.
The rest was accomplished by Jones himself: a prodigious body of work that encompassed scores of plays, nearly 90 television network dramas and episodic series, and some 120 movies. They included his voice work, much of it uncredited, in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, in the credited voice-over of Mufasa in “The Lion
King,” Disney’s 1994 aniJames musical film, and in his reprise of the role in Jon Favreau’s computer-animated remake in 2019.
Jones was no matinee idol, like Cary Grant or Denzel Washington. But his bulky Everyman suited many characters, and his range of forcefulness and subtlety was often compared to Morgan Freeman’s. Nor was he a singer; yet his voice, though not nearly as powerful, was sometimes likened to that of the great Paul Robeson. Jones collected Tonys, Golden Globes, Emmys, Kennedy Center honors and an honorary Academy Award.
Under the artistic and competitive demands of daily stage work and heavy commitments to television and Hollywood – pressures that burn out many actors – Jones was a rock. He once appeared in 18 plays in 30 months. He often made a half-dozen films a year, in addition to his television work. And he did it for a half-century, giving thousands of performances that captivated audiences, moviegoers and critics.
They were dazzled by his presence. A bear of a man – 6 feet, 2 inches tall and
200 pounds – he dominated a stage 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. It was Lear’s roaring crash into madness, Othello’s sweet balm for Desdemona, Oberon’s last rapture for Titania, the queen of the fairies on a midsummer night.
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. He could strut and court lecherously, erupt with rage or melt tenderly; play the blustering Big Daddy in
Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (2008) or an aging Norman
Thayer Jr. in Ernest Thompson’s confrontation with mortality in “On Golden Pond” (2005).
Some theatergoers, aware of Jones’ childhood affliction, discerned occasional subtle hesitations in his delivery of lines. The pauses were deliberate, he said, a technique of selfrestraint learned by stutterers to control involuntary repetitions. Far from detracting from his lucidity, the pauses usually added force to an emotional moment.
Jones profited from a deep analysis of meaning in his lines. “Because of my muteness,” he said in “Voices and Silences,” a 1993 memoir written with Penelope Niven, “I approached language in a different way from most actors. I came at language standing on my head, turning words inside out in search of meaning, making a mess of it sometimes, but seeing truth from a very different viewpoint.”
Another of his theatrical techniques was to stand alone for a few minutes in a darkened wing before the curtain went up, settling himself and silently evoking the emotion he needed for the first scene. It became a nightly ritual during performances of Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Fences” (1987), in which Jones portrayed a sanitation worker brooding over broken dreams, his once promising baseball career cut short by big league racial barriers. It ran for 15 months on Broadway, and Jones won a Tony for best actor.
VOICE OF VADER
Jones’ technique in the first “Star Wars” trilogy – “A New Hope” (1977), “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) and “Return of the Jedi” (1983) – was another trademark. To sustain Vader’s menace – a voice to go with his black cape and a helmet that filtered his hissing breath and evil tidings – Jones spoke in a narrowly inflected range, almost a monotone, to make nearly every phrase sound threatening. (He was credited for voice work in the third film, but, at his request, it was not credited in the first two until a special edition rerelease in 1997.)
Jones was one of the first Black actors to appear regularly on the daytime soaps, playing a doctor in “The Guiding Light” and in “As the World Turns” in the 1960s. Television became a staple of his career. He appeared in the dramatic series “The Defenders,” “Dr. Kildare,” “Touched by an Angel” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and in miniseries, including “Roots: The Next Generation” (1979), playing the author Alex Haley.
Jones’ first Hollywood role was small but memorable, as the B-52 bombardier in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satire on nuclear war, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”