In Memoriam: James Earl Jones (1931-2024), Part 1

 

[When CNN announced in the early evening of Monday, 9 September 2024 that esteemed actor James Earl Jones had died that morning at 93, I immediately e-mailed my friend Kirk Woodward, a theater enthusiast of the first water like me.  He declared succinctly that Jones was “magnificent,” and I emphatically agreed.  “Yes, he was!  I got to see his Jack Jefferson at Arena (where [The Great White Hope] preemed) before it came to Broadway,” I replied.  “I was flabbergasted!” 

[The Great While Hope by Howard Sackler (1929-82) had débuted at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage on 7 December 1967 and ran through 14 January 1968 under the direction of Edwin Sherin (1930-2017).  The production starred James Earl Jones as Jefferson and Jane Alexander as Eleanor Bachman.  I don’t remember exactly when I saw it—with my folks undoubtedly—but I’d have come home to D.C. from college in Virginia for the Christmas-New Year holiday (and my 21st birthday) during the middle of its run.

[The production moved to Broadway’s Alvin Theatre with the original cast largely intact, where it ran from 3 October 1968 to 31 January 1970 for 23 previews and 546 regular performances.  Produced by Herman Levin (1907-90), it won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (Sackler); three 1969 Tony Awards: Best Play (Sackler and Levin), Best Actor in Play (Jones), Best Featured Actress in a Play (Alexander); and two 1969 Drama Desk Awards: Outstanding Performance (Alexander and Jones), Outstanding Director (Sherin).

[As I’ve revealed before on Rick On Theater—I mention it in “A Broadway Baby” (22 September 2010), among other posts—I used to keep a mental list (I never wrote it down and I don’t keep the list anymore—I stopped in the late ‘70s) of the best individual performances I’d seen.  It included Zero Mostel in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (which I saw at the National Theatre in D.C. where it premièred in 1962), Gwen Verdon in Sweet Charity (1966), Stacy Keach in Indians (which I saw at Arena where it began in 1969), Alec McCowen in Hadrian VII (1969), Ben Vereen in Pippin (1972), Virginia Capers in Raisin (1973), Jim Dale in Scapino! (1974), Henry Fonda in Clarence Darrow (1974), Anthony Hopkins in Equus (1974), Donald Sinden in London Assurance (1974), Meryl Streep in A Memory of Two Mondays/27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1976), Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy together in The Gin Game (1977), and (as I recounted in “Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute,” 14 and 17 August 2022) Pat Carroll in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (1979).  Jones’s Jack Jefferson was right at the top of that list.

[I also saw his Troy Maxson in Fences in July 1987. 

[Fences by August Wilson (1945-2005), developed at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s 1983 National Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut, premièred at New Haven, Connecticut’s Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985.  The production, directed by Lloyd Richards (1919-2006) with James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson; Mary Alice (1936-2022) as his wife, Rose; and Courtney B. Vance as Cory, his son, transferred to the 46th Street Theatre on Broadway from 26 March 1987 to 26 June 1988, where it played 11 previews and 525 regular performances.

[The play garnered Wilson the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the production won four 1987 Tony Awards: Best Play, Best Actor in Play (Jones), Best Featured Actress in a Play (Alice), Best Direction of a Play (Richards).  The show also won three 1987 Drama Desk Awards: Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Actor in a Play (Jones), Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play (Alice).

[I remember saying to my companion after seeing Fences that if it weren’t for Jones’s performance, the play wouldn’t be very interesting because so little actually happens.  I can’t prove it’s related, but shortly after Jones was replaced by Billie Dee Williams on 2 February 1988, the play closed—on 26 June.

[It was Jones’s undisputable star power that sustained the show, as statistics suggest.  Before Jones left the production at the end of January 1988, attendance was close to capacity; when he departed, ticket sales dropped to around half.  (Denzel Washington—another star who played Maxson in the 2010 limited Broadway revival—played to near capacity audiences for its entire run.) 

[I guess all of us who are true theater enthusiasts have some kind of brush with undiscovered greatness once or twice in our lives.  In D.C., at the Arena, I saw not only Jones in GWH—by which I was mesmerized!—before he came to Broadway, but also Edward Herrmann (1943-2014) in Moonchildren, before his career took off (he didn’t come to New York with the Off-Broadway transfer).  In addition to Streep in ’76, I saw Annette Bening in Coastal Disturbances at Second Stage Theatre in 1986 before she got famous in Hollywood.  They all stood out somehow.

[In a letter to the editor of New York (in response to a review by the magazine’s theater reviewer, John Simon), the well-known actress Colleen Dewhurst (1924-91), who served as president of the stage actors’ union, the Actors’ Equity Association, from 1985 to 1991, wrote:

More than fifteen years ago, I played Gertrude in a production of Hamlet produced by Joe Papp at the Delacorte [Central Park, 1972] in which James Earl Jones played King Claudius; it is the only time to my knowledge that Claudius took the reviews.  Jones’s talent was such that both critics and audiences recognized only that he was the king and that I, as the queen, was obviously mad for him (“Letters: Role Models,” New York 24 April 1989).

[I don’t have any idea how that phenomenon works, but I’ve experienced it several times—the sense that I’m witnessing something extraordinary.  It was as if these actors had their own spotlights whenever they came on stage. 

If anyone asks me to explain how this special genius manifests itself, however, I’d be unable to come up with the words.  I guess that’s what was known as the “It” factor—undefinable but palpable.  To paraphrase Potter Stewart (in another, not analogous circumstance), I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it!

[Whatever it is, I suspect it’s why Jones never really succeeded on series TV.  It’s too limited a medium to handle his innate power.  Normally, when a good actor, say, Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) or Clive Revill (in the Columbo episode, “The Conspirators” (season 7, episode 5 – 13 May 1978), works in television, he gets more to do as an actor because he can do more—his talent opens up the possibilities that the writers have to work with.  Sometimes, however, the TV screen just can’t contain an actor with tremendous range.  (One exception might be Robin Williams [1951-2014] as Mork in Mork & Mindy [1978-82].)

“JAMES EARL JONES, RESONANT VOICE

OF STAGE AND ‘STAR WARS,’ DIES AT 93”

by Robert D. McFadden 

[James Earl Jones’s obituary ran in the print edition of the New York Times of 11 September 2024 in Section A (the news section), on pages 1 and 22-23.  It was accompanied by the article below.]

He gave life to characters like Darth Vader in “Star Wars” and Mufasa in “The Lion King,” and went on to collect Tonys, Golden Globes, Emmys and an honorary Oscar.

James Earl Jones, a stuttering farm child who became a voice of rolling thunder as one of America’s most versatile actors in a stage, film and television career that plumbed race relations, Shakespeare’s rhapsodic tragedies and the faceless menace of Darth Vader, died on Monday [9 September] at his home in Dutchess County, N.Y. He was 93.

The office of his agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed the death in a statement.

From destitute days working in a diner and living in a $19-a-month cold-water flat, Mr. Jones climbed to Broadway and Hollywood stardom with talent, drive and remarkable vocal cords. He was abandoned as a child by his parents, raised by a racist grandmother and mute for years in his stutterer’s shame, but he learned to speak again with a herculean will. All had much to do with his success.

So did plays by Howard Sackler and August Wilson that let a young actor explore racial hatred in the national experience; television soap operas that boldly cast a Black man as a doctor in the 1960s [As the World Turns and Guiding Light; both CBS, 1966]; and a decision by George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars,” to put an anonymous, rumbling African American voice behind the grotesque mask of the galactic villain Vader.

The rest was accomplished by Mr. Jones himself: a prodigious body of work that encompassed scores of plays, nearly 90 television network dramas and episodic series, and some 120 movies. They included his voice work, much of it uncredited, in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, in the credited voice-over of Mufasa in “The Lion King,” Disney’s 1994 animated musical film, and in his reprise of the role in Jon Favreau’s computer-animated remake in 2019.

Mr. Jones was no matinee idol, like Cary Grant or Denzel Washington. But his bulky Everyman suited many characters, and his range of forcefulness and subtlety was often compared to Morgan Freeman’s. Nor was he a singer; yet his voice, though not nearly as powerful, was sometimes likened to that of the  honors and an honorary Academy Award.

Under the artistic and competitive demands of daily stage work and heavy commitments to television and Hollywood — pressures that burn out many actors — Mr. Jones was a rock. He once appeared in 18 plays in 30 months. He often made a half-dozen films a year, in addition to his television work. And he did it for a half-century, giving thousands of performances that captivated audiences, moviegoers and critics.

They were dazzled by his presence. A bear of a man — 6 feet 2 inches and 200 pounds — he dominated a stage with his barrel chest, large head and emotional fires, tromping across the boards and spitting his lines into the front rows. And audiences were mesmerized by the voice. It was Lear’s roaring crash into madness, Othello’s sweet balm for Desdemona, Oberon’s last rapture for Titania, the queen of the fairies on a midsummer night.

[Jones did King Lear twice, in the early-mid-1960s and 1973; Othello at least 4 times, 1950s-1980s; and Midsummer Night's Dream in the ’60s.]

He liked to portray kings and generals, garbage men [Claudine, 1974; with Diahann Carroll] and bricklayers; perform Shakespeare in Central Park and the works of August Wilson [Fences, 1987] and Athol Fugard [“MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the boys, 1982] on Broadway. He could strut and court lecherously, erupt with rage or melt tenderly; play the blustering Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (2008) or an aging Norman Thayer Jr. in Ernest Thompson’s confrontation with mortality, “On Golden Pond” (2005).

Some theatergoers, aware of Mr. Jones’s childhood affliction, discerned occasional subtle hesitations in his delivery of lines. The pauses were deliberate, he said, a technique of self-restraint learned by stutterers to control involuntary repetitions. Far from detracting from his lucidity, the pauses usually added force to an emotional moment.

Mr. Jones profited from a deep analysis of meaning in his lines. “Because of my muteness,” he said in “Voices and Silences,” a 1993 memoir written with Penelope Niven, “I approached language in a different way from most actors. I came at language standing on my head, turning words inside out in search of meaning, making a mess of it sometimes, but seeing truth from a very different viewpoint.”

Another of his theatrical techniques was to stand alone for a few minutes in a darkened wing before the curtain went up, settling himself and silently evoking the emotion he needed for the first scene. It became a nightly ritual during performances of Mr. Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Fences” (1987), in which Mr. Jones portrayed a sanitation worker brooding over broken dreams, his once promising baseball career cut short by big league racial barriers. It ran for 15 months on Broadway, and Mr. Jones won a Tony for best actor.

Voice of Vader

Mr. Jones’s technique in the first “Star Wars” trilogy — “A New Hope” (1977), “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) and “Return of the Jedi” (1983) — was another trademark. To sustain Vader’s menace — a voice to go with his black cape and a helmet that filtered his hissing breath and evil tidings — Mr. Jones spoke in a narrowly inflected range, almost a monotone, to make nearly every phrase sound threatening. (He was credited for voice work in the third film, but, at his request, he was not credited in the first two until a special edition rerelease in 1997.)

Mr. Jones was one of the first Black actors to appear regularly on the daytime soaps, playing a doctor in “The Guiding Light” and in “As the World Turns” in the 1960s. Television became a staple of his career. He appeared in the dramatic series “The Defenders” [1962 and ’64], “Dr. Kildare” [1966], “Touched by an Angel” [1997] and “Homicide: Life on the Street” [1997 (3 episodes)], and in mini-series, including “Roots: The Next Generation” (1979), playing the author Alex Haley.

Mr. Jones’s first Hollywood role was small but memorable, as the B-52 bombardier in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satire on nuclear war, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

While drama critics recorded his steady progress as an actor, Mr. Jones did not win film stardom until 1970, when he played Jack Jefferson, a character based on Jack Johnson [1878-1946], the first Black boxing champion [1908-15], in “The Great White Hope,” reprising a role he performed on Broadway in 1968. He won a Tony for the stage work and was nominated for an Oscar for the movie.

Although he was never active in the civil rights movement, Mr. Jones said early in his career that he admired Malcolm X [1925-65] and that he, too, might have been a revolutionary had he not become an actor.

He said his contributions to civil rights lay in roles that dealt with racial issues — and there were many. Notable among these was his almost overlooked casting in the 1961 play “The Blacks,” Jean Genet’s [French; 1910-86] violent drama on race relations. It featured a cast that included Maya Angelou [1928-2014], Cicely Tyson [1924-2021], Louis Gossett Jr. [1936-2024] and Billy Dee Williams, some wearing gruesome white masks, who night after night enacted in a kangaroo court the rape and murder of a white woman. Mr. Jones, the brutal and beguiling protagonist, found the role so emotionally draining that he left and then rejoined the cast several times in its three-and-a-half-year run Off Broadway.

But the experience helped clarify his feelings about race. “Through that role,” he told The Washington Post in 1967, “I came to realize that the Black man in America is the tragic hero, the Oedipus, the Hamlet, the Macbeth, even the working-class Willy Loman, the Uncle Tom and Uncle Vanya of contemporary American life.”

James Earl Jones was born in Arkabutla, Miss., on Jan. 17, 1931, to Robert Earl and Ruth (Connolly) Jones. About the time of his birth, his father left the family to chase prizefighting and acting dreams. His mother eventually obtained a divorce. But when James was 5 or 6, his frequently absent mother remarried, moved away and left him to be raised by her parents, John and Maggie Connolly, on a farm near Dublin, Mich.

Abandonment by his parents left the boy with raw wounds and psychic scars. He referred to his mother as Ruth — he said he thought of her as an aunt — and he called his grandparents Papa and Mama, although even the refuge of his surrogate home with them was a troubled place to grow up.

“I was raised by a very racist grandmother, who was part Cherokee, part Choctaw and Black,” Mr. Jones told the BBC in a 2011 interview. “She was the most racist person, bigoted person I have ever known.” She blamed all white people for slavery, and Native American and Black people “for allowing it to happen,” he said, and her ranting compounded his emotional turmoil.

Years of Silence

Traumatized, James began to stammer. By age 8 he was stuttering so badly, and was so mortified by his affliction, that he stopped talking altogether, terrified that only gibberish would come out. In the one-room rural school he attended in Manistee County, Mich., he communicated by writing notes. Friendless, lonely, self-conscious and depressed, he endured years of silence and isolation.

“No matter how old the character I play,” Mr. Jones told Newsweek in 1968, “even if I’m playing Lear, those deep childhood memories, those furies, will come out. I understand this.”

In high school in nearby Brethren, an English teacher, Donald Crouch, began to help him. He found that James had a talent for poetry and encouraged him to write, and tentatively to stand before the class and read his lines. Gaining confidence, James recited a poem a day in class. The speech impediment subsided. He joined a debating team and entered oratorical contests. By graduation, in 1949, he had largely overcome his disability, although the effects lingered and never quite went away.

Years later, Mr. Jones came to believe that learning to control his stutter had led to his career as an actor.

“Just discovering the joy of communicating set it up for me, I think,” he told The New York Times in 1974. “In a very personal way, once I found out I could communicate verbally again, it became a very important thing for me, like making up for lost time, making up for the years that I didn’t speak.”

Mr. Jones enrolled at the University of Michigan on a scholarship, taking pre-med courses, and joined a drama group. With a growing interest in acting, he switched majors and focused on drama in the university’s School of Music, Theater and Dance. In a memoir, he said he left college in 1953 without a degree but resumed studies later to finish his required course work. He received a degree in drama in 1955.

In college, he had also joined the Army under an R.O.T.C. commitment, then washed out of infantry Ranger School. But he did so well in cold-weather training in the Rockies that he considered a military career. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in mid-1953, after the end of the Korean War [1950-53], and was subsequently promoted to first lieutenant.

In 1955, however, he resigned his commission and moved to New York, determined to be an actor. He lived briefly with his father, whom he had met a few years earlier. Robert Jones had a modest acting career and offered encouragement. James found cheap rooms on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, took odd jobs and studied at the American Theater Wing and Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio.

A Run of Shakespeare

After minor roles in small productions, including three plays in which he performed with his father, he joined Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival [now the Public Theater] in 1960; over several years he appeared in “Henry V,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Richard III” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” During a long run as Othello in 1964, he fell in love with Julienne Marie, his Desdemona.

They were married in 1968, but they divorced in 1972. In 1982, he married the actress Cecilia Hart, who had also played Desdemona to one of his Othellos [American Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford Connecticut, 4 August-5 September 1981; Broadway, 3 February-23 May 1982]. She died in 2016. They had a son, Flynn Earl Jones, who survives him, along with a brother, Matthew.

In the 1970s and most of the ’80s, Mr. Jones was in constant demand for stage work in New York, films in Hollywood and television roles on both coasts. He took occasional breaks at a desert retreat near Los Angeles and at his home in Pawling, N.Y., in Dutchess County [1½ hours north of New York City].

But his long run with “Fences” in 1987 and 1988, including a national tour, proved too taxing. He did not return to Broadway for many years, and made movies almost exclusively. His notable film roles included an oppressed coal miner in John Sayles’s “Matewan” (1987); the king of a fictional African nation in the John Landis comedy “Coming to America” (1988), a role he reprised at 90 in 2021 in “Coming 2 America”; an embittered but resilient writer in the baseball movie “Field of Dreams” (1989); and a South African priest in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1995).

Mr. Jones received the National Medal of the Arts from President George Bush at the White House in 1992, Kennedy Center honors in 2002, an honorary Oscar in 2011 for lifetime achievement, and in 2017 a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement, as well as an honorary doctor of arts degree from Harvard University.

In 2015, Mr. Jones and Cicely Tyson appeared in a Broadway revival of D. L. Coburn’s 1976 play, “The Gin Game,” portraying residents of a retirement home making nice, and sometimes not so nice, over a card table. For the 84-year-old Mr. Jones, it was, as The Times noted, his sixth Broadway role in the past decade.

In 2022, Broadway’s 110-year-old Cort Theater was renamed the James Earl Jones Theater.

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

[Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.]

*  *  *  *

“A SIGNATURE GRAVITAS AND DIGNITY

THAT ELEVATED MANY OF HIS ROLES”

by Noel Murray 

[This run-down of James Earl Jones’s film roles was published with the actor’s obituary in the 11 September 2024 issue of the New York Times, on page 23 of Section A,  (There was also an article by Elisabeth Vincentelli on Jones’s stage work in the next issue of the Times, but his post is too long to add it, so I will post it as a follow-up on Wednesday, the 25th—this is, after all, ostensibly a theater blog—with some additional coverage of the renowned actor.)

[Jones, as the Times has reported, would eventually work in some 90 television programs, specials, TV movies, and episodic series, and about 120 movies, as an actor, narrator, or voice actor.  Arguably, Jones’s most famous film “appearance” was as the voice of Darth Vader.  (Probably his second most recognized role was the voice of Mufasa in both the 1994 traditionally animated film The Lion King and the 2019 photorealistically animated remake, plus all the spin-offs.) 

[When Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope) was released in May of 1977, I was puzzled.  I was certain I recognized Jones’s voice behind Vader’s mask, but his name hadn’t been in the opening credits.  I’d seen him on stage in 1967 or ’68—ten years earlier, sure, but his performance, not to mention his melodious and resounding baritone, had made a permanent impression on me. 

[(I had identified Jones as the “Voice of CNN” right off the first time I heard him intone “This . . . is CNN” on television in 1990.  He didn’t need a credit line by then.  As a spokesperson for the network wrote on X, formerly Twitter, Jones “uniquely convey[ed] through speech instant authority, grace, and decorum”—and, in the case of Vader, menace.)

[As for Star Wars, I waited for the final credits, but Jones’s name was nowhere in the crawl.  I was flummoxed.  I was sure I couldn’t be mistaken, but why hire James Earl Jones and not only omit his name from the credits, but never show his face anywhere in the movie?  It didn’t make sense!

[Of course, it was soon common knowledge that the voice of Darth Vader, one of the most prominent characters in what was immediately a cinematic phenomenon—and soon to be acknowledged as one of filmdom’s most renowned villains—was, indeed, that of the emerging stage star, Jame Earl Jones, possessor of one of the most recognizable voices in the English-speaking world.]

A look at standout movies featuring the actor, who died on Monday at the age of 93.

James Earl Jones died on Monday [9 September 2024] at the age of 93. Like his contemporary Sidney Poitier [1927-2022], Jones helped change the perception of Black actors in Hollywood, creating indelible movie and TV characters who defied the prevailing stereotypes.

Born in Mississippi and raised in Michigan, Jones spent much of his early career in New York, working in theater, TV and radio, where he trained his deep, booming voice. Because of his rich vocal tones and authoritative air, the actor was in high demand throughout his professional life, as both a narrator and as someone who could bring a sense of seriousness to supporting parts.

The 12 movies below predominantly showcase Jones’s voice and his skills as a character actor. But the few leading roles show that if he had been given the same kind of opportunities as Poitier, Jones might have been just as big a star.

‘Dr. Strangelove’ (1964)

Not many actors have the good fortune to make their big-screen debut in one of the greatest films of all time. Jones only appears in a handful of scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s grim nuclear war comedy “Dr. Strangelove,” but he does a lot with those few minutes, playing a bombardier whose consummate professionalism leads him to follow the orders of any crackpot commander or incompetent politician who barks in his ear.

‘The Great White Hope’ (1970)

Jones received his only competitive Oscar nomination (becoming the second Black man, after Poitier, to receive one) for his first major leading film role. In an adaptation of Howard Sackler’s stage play — sensitively directed by the great Martin Ritt [1914-90] — Jones plays Jack Jefferson, a character based fairly closely on the early-20th-century boxer Jack Johnson. Both the fictional and the real Jack dealt with widespread social hostility because of their cockiness, success in the ring and interracial relationships. The star is so outsize and charismatic in “The Great White Hope” that he makes those objections seem petty.

‘The Man’ (1972)

Casting a Black actor as the president of the United States has become a Hollywood cliché over the past couple of decades, but it was so radical in 1972 that Rod Serling [1924-75], the creator of “The Twilight Zone” [CBS-TV, 1959-64], was called in to write the screenplay for the big-screen adaptation of Irving Wallace’s [1916-90] best-selling novel “The Man” [1964]. Though the movie overplays the novelty — making most of his administration’s crises race-related — Jones still fleshes the character out, making him into a person, not a symbol.

‘Claudine’ (1974)

The early ’70s were a boom time for African American actors in movies, provided that they were willing to appear in broad comedies or violent genre pictures. “Claudine” was the rare film with a Black lead that was more like the rich character dramas that the “New Hollywood” directors were making circa 1974. Jones plays a garbage man whose romance with a single mother, played by Diahann Carroll, is threatened by her concern that their cohabitation could threaten her welfare payments. Honest about ghetto life without becoming strident, “Claudine” benefits greatly from Jones’s and Carroll’s performances, which are filled with more humor and heart than despair.

‘The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings’ (1976)

This Motown-produced look at the 1930s heyday of barnstorming baseball teams — made up of players too old, too young or too independent for either the major leagues or the Negro leagues — features an A-list ensemble cast, including Billy Dee Williams as an opportunistic cynic and Richard Pryor [1940-2005] as a slick talker looking to pass himself off as anything but Black. Jones plays a home run-hitting activist (modeled after Josh Gibson [the second Negro league player to be inducted in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972; 1911-47]) who is deeply concerned about whether African Americans would control their own future if Major League Baseball were to integrate. “Bingo Long” revisits the carnival atmosphere and showmanship of itinerant sportsmen, while also arguing that even people who make their living playing games deserve to be treated fairly.

‘Star Wars’ (1977)

It would be a disservice to the great David Prowse [1935-2020] — the actual physical presence under Darth Vader’s shiny helmet and black cloak — to say that Jones is primarily responsible for creating one of the best-known villains in movie history. So call it a collaboration between Prowse and Jones, who worked together to give Luke Skywalker’s father both a sense of menace and an unexpectedly sympathetic tragic dimension. Give credit also to George Lucas for hiring someone with a properly grave voice to accentuate the dark lord’s power.

‘Matewan’ (1987)

For whatever reason, Jones rarely worked with the great filmmakers of his era. One of the most prominent and welcome exceptions was “Matewan,” written and directed by John Sayles, who applied his typically novelistic approach to the true story of a violent 1920s clash between West Virginia miners and their employer’s hired goons. Jones plays one of a contingent of Black miners, who have divided loyalties because they can’t all afford the privilege of principled idealism.

[The movie’s plot is set during struggle of the coal miners with the mine owners and their strikebreakers.  Known as the Coal Wars (1890s-1930s), the struggle depicted in Matewan occurred from 1919, when the miners went on strike from 1 November to 10 December in an attempt to unionize the mines of Logan and Mingo Counties, West Virginia, until September 1921.  It included the Matewan Massacre of 19 May 1921 and culminated with the Battle of Blair Mountain, 15 August-2 September 1921, an armed conflict between the miners and their supporters and the lawmen and strikebreakers controlled by the mine owners.]

‘Field of Dreams’ (1989)

In W. P. Kinsella’s [1935-2016] novel “Shoeless Joe” [1982] an Iowa farmer hears voices that tell him first to carve a baseball diamond out of a cornfield and then to find the reclusive novelist J. D. Salinger [1919-2010]. The movie version (renamed “Field of Dreams”) changes the author to the fictional Terence Mann, and casts Jones in the part, relying on the actor’s venerability to sell Mann’s sudden change from irascibly reluctant to a true believer in the hero’s cause. While the film can get awfully hokey, Jones’s speeches about baseball, America and hope always ring true.

[Joseph Jefferson “Shoeless Joe” Jackson (1887-1951) was a Major League outfielder who is most associated now with the 1919 Chicago White Sox team known for the Black Sox Scandal.  Members of the team engaged in a conspiracy to fix the World Series.  After the 1920 season, Jackson was banned from baseball and excluded from the Baseball Hall of Fame.]

‘The Lion King’ (1994)

In addition to Darth Vader, one of the 20th century’s best-known voices helped bring to life yet another of pop culture’s most imposing dads: Mufasa in “The Lion King.” The latter father is much kinder and more beloved than the former, but in both cases, the patriarch’s shadow stretches far, falling over the young heroes as they go through coming-of-age odysseys. Few other performers of Jones’s era could have made characters so vivid while sitting in front of a microphone.

‘Cry, the Beloved Country’ (1995)

The first movie version [1951; British production] of Alan Paton’s [1903-88] 1948 anti-apartheid novel starred a young Poitier as an activist priest helping an older colleague understand the realities of racial strife and poverty in Johannesburg. In the 1995 adaptation [South African-American production] — released after the end of apartheid — Jones is the older priest, embodying a simple, soulful way of life that was lost when South Africa tore itself apart.

‘A Family Thing’ (1996)

Billy Bob Thornton and his screenwriting partner, Tom Epperson, penned this unusually thorny feel-good dramedy, with Robert Duvall playing a Southerner who discovers that he is half Black and has a brother in Chicago he never knew. Jones is the brother, and has been aware — and resentful — of the family secret his entire life. The movie is about the gradual, fitful process of both racial and domestic reconciliation, but Jones carries a lot of deep anger in his performance, making it plain that when it comes to the more shameful corners of American history, forgiveness won’t ever come easy.

‘The Second Civil War’ (1997)

An underrated entry in the filmography of Joe Dante (an underrated director), this HBO movie was prescient in the way it satirizes anti-immigrant hysteria and skewers the rising influence of cable news on politics. Jones here is perfectly cast, playing an old-school broadcaster adjusting to his new bosses, many of whom play fast and loose with the facts in the name of stoking outrage and driving up ratings. It makes sense to have the voice of CNN in this part, representing an age of dignity about to fade into memory.

[Noel Murray is a freelance writer and critic who’s been writing professionally about movies, television, music, and comics for over 20 years, for publications like The Dissolve, The A.V. Club, Vulture, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

[As I said above, I will be posting again on James Earl Jones on Wednesday, 25 September.  I hope you will all return then for further coverage of this great screen and stage actor.]