Scotsman Obituaries: James Earl Jones, US actor who made a universe tremble as voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars

James Earl Jones at the Tony Awards in 2016 in New York City (Picture: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)

Whether playing hero or villain, James Earl Jones exuded authority. This was not a man to mess with. He was the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars films in the 1970s and 1980s. The voice was enough. His rich, deep, tones were among the most distinctive in the business – although he was mute for several years in childhood.

Jones also lent voice and character to Mufasa, the old king in Disney’s 1994 animated hit The Lion King, sounding more like thunder than ever. He could send a shiver down the spine if his voice was angry, a portent of the coming storm, but he could bring a smile to lips with an equally distinctive, warm-hearted chuckle.

This was no Wizard of Oz illusion – the man did justice to the voice, a big commanding figure. Early in his career he played Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight world champion. He played Johnson in both the stage and film versions of The Great White Hope (though the name was changed to Jack Jefferson).

His performance brought him a Tony award as best actor in 1969, and two years later he became only the second black actor to be nominated for the Best Actor Oscar (after Sidney Poitier) after he reprised the role on film. In a tough year, he lost out to George C Scott, who famously refused to accept the award for Patton.

Jones went on to great things on stage and screen. Oddly, however, he never got another Oscar nomination before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was forced to recognise his achievements with an honorary award in 2011 when Alec Baldwin described him as “one of the greatest actors in American history”.

He was born in the rural area of Tate County, in up-state Mississippi, in 1931. His father was Robert Earl Jones, a boxer who sparred with Joe Louis and enjoyed some success as an actor, appearing in later years in The Sting and The Cotton Club. His film career began in the late 1930s, but he had walked out on his family before that. Jones and his father were later reconciled.

Jones went to live with his mother’s parents. It seems to have been a fairly traumatic experience, despite later claims that he got his sense of balance in life from growing up as “a farm kid” in a self-sufficient rural environment. He grew up against a background of racism, from his own grandmother. He would later say in interviews that she was “the most racist person” he ever met.

She hated white people and brought the children up to share her views, telling them bedtime stories about lynchings and rapes. “She would consider it defensive racism,” Jones said in a BBC interview in 2011, “but it’s still racism.”

She also looked down on Native Americans, despite her own Native American blood, and on African-Americans, for allowing themselves to be treated so badly by white people. She did, however, like the Japanese. Jones said they tried to keep her indoors as much as possible during the Second World War.

The family moved to Michigan and Jones developed a stutter, brought on, it seems, by seeing an uncle have a seizure, being sent to find help and having difficulty getting the words out.

Subsequently he would not or could not speak for several years. At high school a teacher encouraged him to recite poetry in front of the class. He found a very precise way of tackling language. And it was his grandmother who encouraged him to pursue his interest in acting at a little summer theatre in Manistee, Michigan.

He did a “pre-med” course at Michigan University, served as an officer in the US Army and studied drama in New York. Despite several appearances in Broadway productions, he considered giving up acting to train as an architect before getting his breakthrough role in The Great White Hope, which opened on Broadway in 1968.

It was particularly controversial because the hero not only clobbers white men in the ring, but has an illegal relationship with a white woman outside it. Although the name was changed slightly, the drama stuck fairly closely to the true story of Jack Johnson.

Jones had a supporting part as the bombardier Lt Zogg in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove and a recurring role as a doctor on the soap Dr Kildare, but his screen career really took off after the film of The Great White Hope and his Oscar nomination, and he went on to appear in over 200 films and television shows.

In the 1970s he played the author Alex Haley in the landmark television mini-series Roots, he was Balthazar in Jesus of Nazareth and Malcolm X in the Muhammad Ali biopic The Greatest. He effectively cemented his place in cinema history as the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars. The English bodybuilder David Prowse played the character on screen, but his strong English West Country accent was not considered the sort of accent that would terrorise an entire universe.

Roles in a diverse range of big Hollywood films followed, including the villain in Conan the Barbarian, an African king in the comedy Coming to America and Admiral Greer in the Jack Ryan thrillers The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger.

He was particularly impressive in Field of Dreams, a brilliant mix of baseball and magic realism, in which he played the reclusive author Terence Mann, a character based on JD Salinger, irascible, but slowly warming to the crazy journey on which Kevin Costner’s character takes him.

By this time he was able to pick and choose from the best roles theatre had to offer and he played Othello on Broadway in 1982. He won a second Tony award for Fences and was Big Daddy in an all-black production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Hoke Colburn in a 2010 stage adaptation of Driving Miss Daisy with Vanessa Redgrave.

He continued working until recently, providing the voice of Mufasa again in the 2019 photorealistic animated remake of The Lion King and voicing Emperor Palpatine impersonating Darth Vader in the 2019 Star Wars instalment The Rise of Skywalker .

Jones was married to the Broadway actress Julienne Marie in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The marriage ended in divorce and he married the actress Cecilia Hart in 1982. She died in 2016. He is survived by a son from his second marriage.

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