James Earl Jones, who died on Monday, said he was unable to speak for eight years as a child because of his stutter. He later went on to voice some of Hollywood’s most famous characters, including Darth Vader in “Star Wars.”
While Jones appeared physically in films such as “Coming to America,” “The Hunt for Red October,” and “Conan the Barbarian,” he became known primarily as a voice actor.
Roles such as Mufasa in Disney’s “The Lion King” made Jones one of the most famous voices in film history and in 2011 he received an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement.
Over the years, the actor has spoken at length about how dealing with his stutter helped him land some of the biggest roles in the industry.
In 2010, Jones told the Daily Mail how difficult it was to stutter in front of his classmates: “Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I would try to read my lessons and the children behind me would fall on the floor laughing.”
He first began stuttering as a child when he moved from Mississippi to Michigan to live with his grandparents in 1936 at the age of five.
He told the Academy of Achievement in 1996 that his stutter had gotten worse and he was unable to speak for nearly a decade.
“When I came to Michigan, I stuttered. I couldn’t speak. So my freshman year of school was my first silent year, and then it continued with those silent years until I got to high school,” Jones said.
He added: “I still stutter. But we all find a way to hide it. And sometimes, I guess, our vocabulary might be a little bigger than usual because we have to find a word that we won’t stumble over. A word that starts with the right consonant. I came to terms with that as a child.”
The actor made progress in high school thanks to his English teacher Donald Crouch, who questioned Jones on whether he had plagiarized a poem or written it himself.
“He said, ‘That’s a good poem. It’s so good. I don’t believe you wrote it. To prove you wrote it, stand up in front of the class and say it out loud.’ And that was it,” Jones recalled.
“I don’t know if he came up with that challenge or not, but he really meant it. And I stood up and said it without stuttering. A nice surprise.”
