During the run of the 2011 revival of Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy in London, with Vanessa Redgrave, the actor James Earl Jones, who has died aged 93, was presented with an honorary Oscar by Ben Kingsley, with a link from the Wyndham’s theatre to the awards ceremony in Hollywood.
Glenn Close in Los Angeles said that Jones represented the “essence of truly great acting” and Kingsley spoke of his imposing physical presence, his 1,000-kilowatt smile, his basso profundo voice and his great stillness. Jones’s voice was known to millions as that of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars film trilogy and Mufasa in the 1994 Disney animation The Lion King, as well as being the signature sound of US TV news (“This is CNN”) for many years.
His status as the leading black actor of his generation was established with the Tony award he won in 1969 for his performance as the boxer Jack Jefferson (a fictional version of Jack Johnson) in Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope on Broadway, a role he repeated in Martin Ritt’s 1970 film, and which earned him an Oscar nomination.
On screen, Jones – as the fictional Douglass Dilman – played the first African-American president, in Joseph Sargent’s 1972 movie The Man, based on an Irving Wallace novel. His stage career was notable for encompassing great roles in the classical repertoire, such as King Lear, Othello, Hickey in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh and Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
He was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, the son of Robert Earl Jones, a minor actor, boxer, butler and chauffeur, and his wife Ruth (nee Connolly), a teacher, and was proud of claiming African and Irish ancestry. His father left home soon after he was born, and he was raised on a farm in Jackson, Michigan, by his maternal grandparents, John and Maggie Connolly. He spoke with a stutter, a problem he dealt with at Brown’s school in Brethren, Michigan, by reading poetry aloud.
On graduating from the University of Michigan, he served as a US Army Ranger in the Korean war. He began working as an actor and stage manager at the Ramsdell theatre in Manistee, Michigan, where he played his first Othello in 1955, an indication perhaps of his early power and presence.
The family had moved from the deep south to Michigan to find work, and now Jones went to New York to join his father in the theatre and to study at the American Theatre Wing with Lee Strasberg. He made his Broadway debut at the Cort theatre in 1958 in Dory Schary’s Sunrise at Campobello, a play about Franklin D Roosevelt.
He was soon a cornerstone of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare festival in Central Park, playing Caliban in The Tempest, Macduff in Macbeth and another Othello in the 1964 season. He also established a foothold in films, as Lt Lothar Zogg in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1963), a cold war satire in which Peter Sellers shone with brilliance in three separate roles.
The Great White Hope came to the Alvin theatre in New York from the Arena Stage in Washington, where Jones first unleashed his shattering, shaven-headed performance – he was described as chuckling like thunder, beating his chest and rolling his eyes – in a production by Edwin Sherin that exposed racism in the fight game at the very time of Muhammad Ali’s suspension from the ring on the grounds of his refusal to sign up for military service in the Vietnam war.
Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs (1970) was a response to Jean Genet’s The Blacks, in which Jones, who remained much more of an off-Broadway fixture than a Broadway star in this period, despite his eminence, played a westernised urban African man returning to his village for his father’s funeral. With Papp’s Public theatre, he featured in an all-black version of The Cherry Orchard in 1972, following with John Steinbeck’s Lennie in Of Mice and Men on Broadway and returning to Central Park as a stately King Lear in 1974.
When he played Paul Robeson on Broadway in the 1977-78 season, there was a kerfuffle over alleged misrepresentations in Robeson’s life, but Jones was supported in a letter to the newspapers signed by Edward Albee, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman and Richard Rodgers. He played his final Othello on Broadway in 1982, partnered by Christopher Plummer as Iago, and appeared in the same year in Master Harold and the Boys by Athol Fugard, a white South African playwright he often championed in New York.
In August Wilson’s Fences (1987), part of that writer’s cycle of the century “black experience” plays, he was described as an erupting volcano as a Pittsburgh garbage collector who had lost his dreams of a football career and was too old to play once the major leagues admitted black players. His character, Troy Maxson, is a classic of the modern repertoire, confined in a world of 1950s racism, and has since been played by Denzel Washington and Lenny Henry.
Jones’s film career was solid if not spectacular. Playing Sheikh Abdul, he joined a roll call of British comedy stars – Terry-Thomas, Irene Handl, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan and Peter Ustinov – in Marty Feldman’s The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977), in stark contrast to his (at first uncredited) Malcolm X in Ali’s own biopic, The Greatest (1977), with a screenplay by Ring Lardner. He also appeared in Peter Masterson’s Convicts (1991), a civil war drama; Jon Amiel’s Sommersby (1993), with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster; and Darrell Roodt’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1995), scripted by Ronald Harwood, in which he played a black South African pastor in conflict with his white landowning neighbour in the 40s.
In all these performances, Jones quietly carried his nation’s history on his shoulders. On stage, this sense could irradiate a performance such as that in his partnership with Leslie Uggams in the 2005 Broadway revival at the Cort of Ernest Thompson’s elegiac On Golden Pond; he and Uggams reinvented the film performances of Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn as an old couple in a Maine summer house.
He brought his Broadway Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to London in 2009, playing an electrifying scene with Adrian Lester as his broken sports star son, Brick, at the Novello theatre. The coarse, cancer-ridden big plantation owner was transformed into a rumbling, bear-like figure with a totally unexpected streak of benignity perhaps not entirely suited to the character. But that old voice still rolled through the stalls like a mellow mist, rich as molasses.
That benign streak paid off handsomely, though, in the London reprise of a deeply sentimental Broadway comedy (and Hollywood movie), Driving Miss Daisy, in which his partnership as a chauffeur to Redgrave (unlikely casting as a wealthy southern US Jewish widow, though she got the scattiness down to a tee) was a delightful two-step around the evolving issues of racial tension between 1948 and 1973.
So deep was this bond with Redgrave that he returned to London for a third time in 2013 to play Benedick to her Beatrice in Mark Rylance’s controversial Old Vic production of Much Ado About Nothing, the middle-aged banter of the romantically at-odds couple transformed into wistful, nostalgia for seniors.
His last appearance on Broadway was in a 2015 revival of DL Coburn’s The Gin Game, opposite Cicely Tyson. He was given a lifetime achievement Tony award in 2017, and the Cort theatre was renamed the James Earl Jones theatre in 2022.
Jones’s first marriage, to Julienne Marie (1968-72), ended in divorce. In 1982 he married Cecilia Hart with whom he had a son, Flynn. She died in 2016. He is survived by Flynn, also an actor, and a brother, Matthew.
• James Earl Jones, actor, born 17 January 1931; died 9 September 2024
