The voice of Darth Vader barely spoke a word through childhood
After moving to his grandparents' Michigan farm at five, James Earl Jones developed a stutter so severe that he stopped talking, and stayed nearly mute until high school. An English teacher who noticed his poetry made him read it aloud. That rumbling basso profondo later gave voice to Darth Vader and Mufasa.
Jones was born on January 17, 1931, in Arkabutla, Mississippi. His father, Robert Earl Jones, a boxer and chauffeur who later became an actor himself, left shortly after the birth; the two did not really know each other until reconciling in the 1950s. His grandparents, who had moved north in the Great Migration, raised him in Dublin, Michigan. He called his early school years mute years, and credited the teacher Donald Crouch with coaxing his voice back through recitation.
He enrolled at the University of Michigan as a pre-med student, thrived in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, and switched to drama, half expecting to be sent to Korea. Instead the Army sent him to Ranger School and then to a cold-weather training command in the Colorado Rockies, and he left as a first lieutenant. In New York he studied at the American Theatre Wing while working as a janitor.
Stage work came first. At the Ramsdell Theatre in Manistee he began as a carpenter and played Othello in his first acting season. By the 1960s he was among the best-known Shakespearean actors in the country through Shakespeare in the Park. Stanley Kubrick went to one production to see George C. Scott, noticed Jones as the Prince of Morocco, and cast him as the bombardier Lothar Zogg in Dr. Strangelove, his 1964 film debut. He won Tony Awards for The Great White Hope, playing a boxer, and for August Wilson's Fences, and the film of The Great White Hope brought an Oscar nomination.
Films ranged from Conan the Barbarian and Coming to America to Field of Dreams and The Hunt for Red October, but his voice made him globally recognisable, above all as Vader and as Mufasa in The Lion King in 1994. He became one of the rare performers to complete the EGOT, won an Academy Honorary Award in 2011, and died on September 9, 2024.
Source: James Earl Jones
