James Earl Jones, an impressive screen presence, achieved greater fame off-camera than the sonorous voice of star Wars Villain Darth Vader and Mufasathe kind leader in The Lion Kingdied on Monday. He was 93 years old.

Jones, who rose to fame in 1970 with his impressive, Oscar-nominated performance as America’s first black heavyweight champion in The great white hopedied at his home in Dutchess County, New York, the Independent Artist Group announced.

The renowned star made his film debut in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strange Love or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb (1964) and was notable in many other films, including Claudine (1974) compared to Diahann Carroll; Field of Dreams (1989) as the reclusive author Terence Mann; and The sandbank (1993), as the intimidating neighborhood boy, Mr. Mertle.

For his work on stage, Jones received two Tony Awards for Best Actor: for the role of Jack Jefferson – based on the real-life boxer Jack Johnson – in Howard Sackler’s The great white hope and for his role as the patriarch in the 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning production of August Wilson’s Fences.

Jones, who received an honorary Oscar at the 2011 Governors Awards and a special Tony for lifetime achievement in 2017, was one of the few people to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony, and the first actor to win two Emmy in one year.

“You can’t be an actor like me without having been in some of the worst movies,” said the self-deprecating star as he received his Oscar. “But I stand before you, deeply honored, infinitely grateful and simply speechless.”

Jones’ rise to become one of the most admired American actors of all time is remarkable considering he suffered from a debilitating stutter as a child.

He was born as Todd Jones on January 17, 1931, and grew up in ArkabutlaMississippi, and was raised by his maternal grandparents. At the age of 5, the family moved to a farm in Dublin, Michigan.

“The move was kind of traumatic,” he once recalled. “My ability to communicate started to deteriorate. I couldn’t talk to people without stuttering,” and he pretended to be mute.

When an English teacher in high school encouraged Jones to read a poem he had written to the class, he found that his stutter disappeared when he spoke memorized words. In his senior year, he won a speech contest and received a full scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he studied medicine and discovered acting.

He made his stage debut in a community theatre production in Manistee, Michiganbefore he went to fight in the Korean War.

After his release, Jones moved to New York to act in theater and made his Broadway debut in 1958 in Sunrise at Campobellothe Tony winner for best play written by Dory Shary and Ralph Bellamy played President Franklin Roosevelt, who was suffering from polio.

Jones said THR in 2011 that his career was guided by the words of his father, Robert Earl Jones – an actor who had been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee but who had The highlight — he told him as he was just starting.

“If you want to run this business, must do it because you love it, not because it becomes “I’m going to be rich or famous. That was the best advice he could give me,” he said.

Kubrick Casting of Jones as Lt. Lothar Zogga member of the crew of the B-52 bomber, in Dr. Strange Love after discovering him in a Shakespeare in the Park production in New York.

“George C. Scott played Shylock when Kubrick came to see it,” he recalled in an interview in January 2014. “I was also in the play, as the Prince of Morocco, and Kubrick said, “I’ll take the black one too.” He didn’t actually say that, but that’s how I like to put it.”

His appearance alongside the future chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Jane Alexander, in The great white hope (she also won a Tony) brought him the cover of Newsweek Magazine in October 1968 (headline: “New Star on Broadway”), and for the film version he would be only the second black man (after Sidney Poitiers) to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

When director George Lucas was casting for a bass voice for Darth Vader star Wars (1977) he considered Orson to be Welles but he felt his voice might be too familiar, so he called Jones’ agent and asked if the actor would like to work for a day.

Jones received a flat fee of $7,000 for the work and only admitted in the third film in the series that he had lent his voice to Darth Vader.

Once, while traveling across the country, Jones played his Darth Vader voice over the CB radio scanner. “The truck drivers were going crazy – to them, it was Darth Vader. I had to stop doing that,” he said. The New York Times Magazine.

As for his character’s voice The Lion KingJones said in a 2011 interview that he still enjoys meeting children who are loyal to the 1994 Disney classic.

“Your parents will say: ‘There is Mufasa!’ But I don’t look like a lion, and when they are really small children, they think they are being cheated or that they are being duped,” he said. “And I can’t prove it to them, but I can say (in Mufasa’s Agree), ‘Simba. You deliberately disobeyed me!'”

Jones was, of course, also known as the “voice” of CNN.

“I just cleared my mind and then filled it with the thought of all the hundreds of stories – tragic, violent, funny, touching – that could come my way,” he said when asked about his motivation. “And then I said, ‘This is CNN.'”

Jones also made a lasting impression on screen as “Few Clothes” Johnson in John. Sayles’ Matewan (1987), as Rev. Stephen Kumalo in the apartheid drama Wines, the beloved country (1995) and as Robert Duvall’s bitter half-brother in A family affair (1996).

He played Admiral Greer in three films based on Tom Clancy novels: Hunt for Red October (1990), The Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and present danger (1994) — and was King Jaffe Joffer in a pair Coming to America 2 films, including a 2020 sequel.

Jones’ two Emmy came to the ABC in 1991 for the role of a private investigator who was wrongfully imprisoned in the short-lived ABC drama series Gabriel’s Fire and as the owner of a shoe repair shop in the TNT television film Heatwaveabout the Watts riots of 1965 in Los Angeles.

Among the countless roles he played on stage were Thurgood Marshall, the first black judge on the Supreme Court of the United States; Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; President Arthur Hockstader In The best man; and chauffeur Hoke Colburn In Miss Daisy and her chauffeuropposite Angela Lansbury.

In 2022, Broadway’s 110-year-old Cort Theatre was renamed The James Earl Jones Theatre in his honor.

He married actress Julienne Marie in 1968 after meeting her during a production of Othellobut they divorced four years later. He met his second wife, actress Cecilia Hart, while filming the CBS police drama Parisin which he played a police captain and she played a young policewoman. They married in 1982 and had a son, Flynn. Hart died of ovarian cancer in October 2016 at the age of 68.