An American Voice: James Earl Jones, 1931-2024
By • September 12, 2024 One Comment 224
Actor James Earl Jones — the phrase seems redundant — who rose to stardom when opportunities for Blacks were few and brought role after role to memorable life for half a century, died at 93 on Sept. 9.
Awarded the 1992 National Medal of Arts by President George H.W. Bush, he received a 2002 Kennedy Center Honor and a 2012 Academy Award “for his legacy of consistent excellence and uncommon versatility.”
Jones contributed to the field’s gradual opening to persons of color not by activism but by his example; his record of success wore down resistance and inspired several generations of Black actors. (The launch of organizations and movements such as Black to Broadway, Oscars So White, the R.I.S.E. [Representation, Inclusion and Support for Employment] Network and We See You, White American Theater reflects the persistence of racial inequality.)
Unlike nearly all of his American male counterparts — Brando, Eastwood, Hoffman, Newman, Redford — Jones was fundamentally a classical actor. Though his rich bass voice was a genetic gift, its development came about curiously.
Born on his maternal grandparents’ farm in Arkabutla, Mississippi, in 1931, Jones acquired a stutter — likely from the childhood traumas of an absent father, separation from his mother and a disorienting move to Dublin, Michigan — which led to years of near-muteness.
“James Earl Jones: Voices and Silences,” his 1993 memoir, co-authored by Penelope Niven, is dedicated to two mentors. One is “Professor Donald Crouch, father of my resurrected voice.” Crouch was a high school English teacher who discovered that Jones was writing poetry. On a hunch, he called on his silent student to read one of his poems aloud, and the words flowed.
The other dedicatee? “Robert Earl Jones, my natural father.”
In the early scenes of the 1973 film “The Sting,” Luther, one of Hooker’s (Redford’s) grifter pals, looks and sounds a lot like James Earl Jones. You guessed it.
A boxer-turned-actor — and, to make matters worse, a leftist — Robert Earl Jones, divorced from Jones’s mother, was considered a ne’er-do-well by his son’s family, who blocked any contact between them. But at 21, Jones hitchhiked to New York in his University of Michigan ROTC uniform to meet his father, essentially for the first time.
They saw “Tosca” and “Swan Lake” at the Metropolitan Opera. They saw “Pal Joey” and “The Crucible” on Broadway. Then his father took him to hear a vocal recital by a friend, Paul Robeson.
Jones writes: “Robert Earl took me backstage after the concert to introduce me, and to his surprise, Robeson embraced me, uniform and all. I could tell that for Robeson the issue of black soldiers fighting yellow soldiers [in the Korean War] was an international political issue, not a personal issue. To my gratitude, he accepted me as I was, as the son of Robert Earl Jones.”
Along with his vocal cords and his passion for Shakespeare (if not his politics), Jones seems to have inherited his father’s longevity; Robert Earl Jones died in 2006 at the age of 96.
After two years of stateside military service, the G.I. Bill paid for Jones to study acting in New York at the American Theatre Wing. He writes: “I played as many as possible of Shakespeare’s characters in those workshops. I knew that I would not get to do them in commercial productions — or, if so, only rarely — but that was not true at the Theatre Wing. There, I could be Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. Race did not matter.”
His first breaks came in the early 1960s, the boom years of Off-Broadway. Jones became an on-again-off-again member of the all-Black cast of a long-running English version of French avant-garde playwright Jean Genet’s “The Blacks” (also cast: Maya Angelou and Cicely Tyson). Race relations were heating up. When James Baldwin attached himself to the production as a spokesman, “I resented his need to politicize our drama more than it was already,” Jones writes.
Off-Broadway producer Joe Papp, who Jones knew from the Theatre Wing, ran into Jones on the street and invited him to join the New York Shakespeare Festival. In 1962, Jones played the Prince of Morocco to George C. Scott’s Shylock in Central Park (Stanley Kubrick, who saw the show, hired both for “Dr. Strangelove.”). Two years later, Papp cast Jones as Othello in a production that ran at the same time as the London production with Laurence Olivier in blackface, distressingly captured in the 1965 film.
Playing “Othello” as a Black man comes with baggage (but not the blackface issue, at least), which Jones explores in his memoir. Discussing the role’s interpretive challenges, he lists the seven occasions when he has portrayed Othello, from 1956 in Michigan to 1981 on Broadway, also refuting the rumor that he became involved with all of his Desdemonas (he married two of them: Julienne Marie and Cecilia Hart).
Jones’s hero Paul Robeson was a legendary Othello in the 1940s, Laurence Fishburne played the Moor in a 1995 film and, when Denzel Washington stars in next year’s Broadway production, it will mark the bicentennial of the London debut of Ira Aldridge, the first American-born Black tragedian, who left the U.S. for England in his teens.
The first of two roles that Jones calls career “thunderbolts” was Jack Jefferson in “The Great White Hope,” Howard Sackler’s play based on early 20th-century Black boxing champion Jack Johnson. Directed by Edwin Sherin at Arena Stage, it premiered in D.C. in December of 1967 and opened on Broadway in October of 1968. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. Both Jones and Jane Alexander, who played Jefferson’s white mistress, also won Tonys.
What followed stardom? More plays, by Shakespeare, Chekhov, O’Neill, Fugard and others; many movies (including “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings,” “Conan the Barbarian,” “Soul Man,” “Coming to America,” “Field of Dreams,” “The Hunt for Red October” and “Patriot Games”); and assorted TV movies, series, episodes and specials (Jones won three Emmys).
The second lightning strike came in August Wilson’s “Fences,” another Pulitzer and Tony winner. After incubation at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, it premiered in 1985 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Lloyd Richards, and went to Broadway in 1987. Jones played Troy Maxson, a washed-up Negro League ballplayer in 1950s Pittsburgh, winning a Tony, as did Mary Alice, playing Maxson’s wife, and Richards.
Martin Ritt’s not very successful 1970 movie version of “The Great White Hope” has fallen off the radar. Jones writes that it was a disappointment for several reasons. He was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award, but it went to his buddy Scott (who said “no thanks”) for “Patton.” Though one has to absorb the N-word over and over, the film preserves an astounding performance — a revelation for those who only know the Jones of late middle age and older.
James Earl Jones in “The Great White Hope,” Martin Ritt’s 1970 film, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Howard Sackler that premiered at Arena Stage.
In the film, one sees Jones in his youthful prime, tall (6-foot-2), handsome and as buffed as he ever was thanks to a strenuous training regimen. Jefferson is made to speak a raw, semi-Southern dialect invented by Sackler, but Jones’s extraordinary instrument is unmistakable.
For many, that extraordinary American voice — the one behind Darth Vader’s grill, Mufasa’s jaws (Aaron Pierre will take over in the “Lion King” sequel) and the CNN logo — is how the former stuttering boy from Arkabutla will remain lodged in our minds.
What a fabulous obituary
. Jones must be “kvelling,” in the hereafter.