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James Earl Jones, the American actor known for voicing Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise and Mufasa in The Lion King, has died at the age of 93, it was announced Monday.
His cause of death was not immediately revealed.
Jones was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in the mid-1990s, a fact he made public in 2016.
Across a storied career on stage and screen, Jones received three Tony Awards, two Emmys and a Grammy.
He was born in the village of Arkabutla, Mississippi, on 17 January 1931, to parents of mixed African-American, Irish and Native American ancestry. His mother was a teacher and a maid while his father was a boxer and an actor, appearing in films such as The Sting (1973) and Trading Places (1983).
From the age of five, Jones was raised by his maternal grandparents on their farm in Dublin, Michigan. He found the move so traumatic that he developed a severe stutter and was nearly mute for eight years. “In Sunday school, I’d try to read my lessons and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter… By the time I got to school, my stuttering was so bad that I gave up trying to speak properly,” Jones recalled in an interview with the Daily Mail.
He credited his high school English teacher with ending his silence after he was encouraged to read poetry in front of the class. “I don’t say I was ‘cured,’” he told NPR in 2014. “I just work with it.”
He went on to attend the University of Michigan, dropping out of a pre-medical course in favor of acting, and encountered racism in college. “There weren’t many Black fellows at the University of Michigan,” Jones said during a 2005 talk at the Oxonian Society. “In response to a paper I wrote, a professor called me in. I had spelled simplicity ‘simplisity’. ‘Why are you trying to be someone you’re not?’ he said. ‘You’re a dumb son of a b**** who doesn’t belong at a university!’ I had no idea how to respond to such deep-seated racism.”
He then joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and, after graduating, was assigned to the 38th Regimental Combat Team, where he led the setup of a cold weather training command in snowy Colorado. “I loved the austere beauty of the mountains and the exhilaration of the weather and the altitude. I didn’t mind the rigors of the work or the pioneer-like existence. I thought it was a good life,” he later said.
After his discharge, Jones moved to New York City, studying acting at the American Theatre Wing using his veteran benefits and working as a janitor to support himself.
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His big break came in 1967 with The Great White Hope, a play that premiered in Washington, DC, and hit Broadway a year later. Jones played the main character, Jack Jefferson (modeled after Jack Johnson), a champion boxer fighting racism in and out of the ring. He won a Tony Award for best actor for the role and the story was later adapted into a movie, which he also starred in. “The Great White Hope put me on the cover of Newsweek magazine,” he said. “One day that week, somebody noticed you.”
In 1977, Jones made his debut as the terrifying Sith Lord Darth Vader in George Lucas’s space opera blockbuster Star Wars: A New Hope, a role for which he was paid just $7,000. He would reprise the role for the sequels, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). Vader was portrayed in costume by David Prowse (who died in 2020) with Jones dubbing the dialogue in post-production because Prowse’s strong British accent was deemed unsuitable for the character by Lucas.
From arch-villain, Jones transitioned into an archetypal father figure in 1994 when he lent his rumbling voice to the role of Mufasa in Disney’s The Lion King. He returned to the role in 2019 for Jon Favreau’s live-action remake – the only original cast member to do so. Chiwetel Ejiofor, who voiced Mufasa’s evil brother Scar in the remake, said that “the comfort of [Jones reprising his role] is going to be very rewarding in taking [the audience] on this journey again. It’s a once-in-a-generation vocal quality.”
Jones’s other notable film roles include Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America (1988), Field of Dreams (1989), Dr Strangelove (1964), Conan the Barbarian (1982) and The Hunt for Red October (1990). On television, he voiced various characters on The Simpsons in three separate seasons and appeared in episodes of Law & Order (1993), Frasier (1997), Two and a Half Men (2008), House (2009), and The Big Bang Theory (2014).
In 2016, Jones spoke publicly for the first time in nearly 20 years about his type 2 diabetes diagnosis. “I didn’t notice any symptoms,” Jones said. “I had gone to a diet and exercise program hoping to lose some weight and ended up falling asleep sitting on a bench in the gymnasium. My doctor, who happened to be there, said that’s not normal. He encouraged me to go get a test, and I did – and there it was: type 2 diabetes. It hit me like a thunderbolt.”
He continued: “I can live to the extent that I can do all the work I used to do 10 years ago. I love working, and at my age I still love being able to put in eight shows a week on a play or handle a long schedule if I’m doing film or television. I didn’t want that to stop, so I had to take responsibility with my condition.”
Even in death, Jones’s unmistakable baritone will live on. In 2022, he signed off on archival voice recordings to be manipulated for future iterations of Darth Vader with the use of artificial intelligence. “David Prowse worked very hard to create the character Darth Vader. He is Vader. I just consider myself to be special effects,” Jones said self-deprecatingly in his 1993 memoir. “That’s how I approached it. I just sat there and had all the fun of playing my voice like an instrument.” What an instrument it was.
Jones is survived by his son Flynn Earl Jones. His second wife of 36 years, actor Cecilia Hart, died from ovarian cancer in 2016.
