James Earl Jones
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS.
The irony of fate: James Earl Jones has more than 80 film roles, two Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards for theatre, and was nominated for an Oscar… And he is remembered primarily for the voice of a single character. It is true that he is one of the most famous characters in the history of cinema: Darth Vader, the main villain and at the same time the father of the main character of Star Wars.
It is curious that the actor, who became famous largely thanks to his voice, did not find it right away. Jones was born in 1931 on a farm in Arkabutla, Mississippi; in childhood, stress caused him to stutter severely, and until high school he flatly refused to speak, preferring to appear mute. The young man was able to overcome all this only thanks to his English teacher, who noticed his poetic talent and asked him to read his own poems aloud in front of the class.
After graduating from college and serving in the army, Jones began acting in the theater and achieved great success there in Shakespearean roles. And he made his film debut only at the age of 33, but immediately with Stanley Kubrick in his famous “Doctor Strangelove.” In the 60s he acted in films rarely, but successfully: his fourth role, in the film “The Great White Hope”, earned him an Oscar nomination. In the 1972 film The Man, he played the first African American to become president of the United States, and in the biopic The Greatest (a film about Muhammad Ali, in which the hero, in a rare case, played himself) he appeared as the fighter for black rights Malcolm X.
The famous artist was 93 years old.
Photo: EAST NEWS.
The same year that The Greatest was released, in 1977, Star Wars was released. Darth Vader was played by actor David Prowse, but he never got the chance to be heard on screen: George Lucas didn’t like his accent and preferred to invite Jones, who spoke with a beautiful velvety bass, to do the dubbing. But Jones did not want to take away Prowse’s fame and asked that his name not appear in the credits. He was not mentioned until 1983, when the final part of the first trilogy, Return of the Jedi, was released.
Jones did not want to detract from Prowse’s fame and asked that his name not be mentioned in the credits.
Photo: EAST NEWS.
So everything went well for Jones, except that he no longer came across blockbusters like Star Wars. However, one can recall “Conan the Barbarian”, where he played the evil wizard Thulsa Doom (in the finale he was beheaded by Arnold Schwarzenegger) or “Coming to America”, where he became the king of the fictional African country of Zamunda Jaffe Joffer (his son, played by Eddie Murphy, traveled to America in search of a suitable bride). He also played Admiral James Greer in three film adaptations of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan novels (The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger). He did a lot of work dubbing cartoons (and the most interesting thing here is not even “The Simpsons”, but Mufasa in the original Disney “The Lion King”). He worked extensively in television and in 1991 became the only actor to receive two Emmy Awards in one night: for best supporting actor in the miniseries Heat Wave and for best lead actor in a drama series Gabriel’s Fire.
In 2009, he received an honorary Screen Actors Guild Award for lifetime achievement, in 2011 an honorary Oscar, and in 2017 an honorary Tony Award. He has spent the past ten years in the status of a living legend, sometimes returning to old roles: He reprised his role as the King of Zamunda in the sequel to Coming to America, voiced Mufasa in the new The Lion King and Darth Vader in Rogue One. But he no longer began work on the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” series, which was released two years ago: he asked the writers to take Vader’s old lines and voice the role based on them, using artificial intelligence.
