Legendary Actor James Earl Jones Dies at 93

Rather than march and demonstrate, he channeled his activism into his art, narrating a documentary about slain leader Martin Luther King Jr., for example, in 1970. The previous year, he won the first of his two Tony Awards for his performance in The Great White Hope, based loosely on the story of Black boxer Jack Johnson.

“I’m sure a lot of Black people thought I was a chicken s--- or shirking my responsibility,” he told the Toronto Star in 2013. “Don’t get me wrong. I believe in the same things that all those people demonstrating believe in, but I just look for plays or movies that say the same thing and play characters in them.”

Born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, on Jan. 17, 1931, he had acting in his blood, though it took him a while to recognize it. His father, Robert Earl Jones, a butler, boxer and chauffeur, abandoned the family shortly after his son’s birth to become a stage and screen actor on both coasts. (Jones would not meet and reconcile with him until the 1950s.) His mother, a teacher and maid, left him with her parents to find work.

After his grandparents joined the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South and settled in Michigan, Jones began writing poetry to deal with his functional muteness and feelings of displacement. His high school English teacher noted his interest in literature and told him if the words he read had moved him so, he needed to be able to speak them.

“The idea of being able to say those words really inspired me,” Jones said later to CNN. “I never expected to be able to write things like that, but I did want to enjoy saying them.”

His teacher worked with him on clarity of speech and then issued a second piece of advice: “Don’t listen to yourself. Don’t listen to the tones you make, because you might be impressed by it. If you start listening to yourself, nobody else will.”

At the University of Michigan, Jones initially studied premed, but overcoming his stutter gave him the confidence to try acting and he switched his major to drama. After a stint in the Army, he moved to New York in the 1950s to study at the American Theatre Wing, supporting himself as a janitor. An early review from a performance at New York’s Equity Library Theater pointed out his “muffled diction,” and despite his subsequent mastery of well-ordered elocution, Jones said to the Toronto Star in 2013 that he still had trouble controlling his stutter “when anger or high anxiety hits me.”

Jones made his Broadway debut in Dore Schary’s Sunrise at Campobello in 1958, and went on to distinguish himself in a number of Shakespearean roles onstage in the 1960s, including Othello for Joseph Papp in 1964, for which he won an Obie Award. He made his film debut as a B-52 bombardier in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

The Great White Hope, at the end of the ’60s, made him a star, with The New York Times noting that it was the actor’s “signal opportunity to use a powerful range of gifts, and he seized it.” His success declared him much in demand in the 1970s: He starred in the television miniseries Roots: The Next Generations and won a second Tony for his role in August Wilson’s Black family drama Fences (1987). Jones would also win a special Tony for lifetime achievement in 2017.

Despite being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in the 1990s, he never stopped working, whether onstage (Driving Miss Daisy, The Gin Game), in television (he won two Prime Time Emmys), commercial work or feature films.

In 2021, he reprised his 1988 role of King Jaffe Joffer (Coming to America) in Eddie Murphy’s comedy Coming 2 America. On his 90th birthday that year, he said he planned to spend the day “reflecting on past years and thinking about what’s next.”

Jones, who received both the National Medal of the Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors, was married twice, both times to actresses. His four-year union with Julienne Marie ended in divorce in 1972. He was married to Cecilia Hart, with whom he had a son, Flynn Earl Jones, from 1982 until her death in 2016.