With James Earl Jones, the voice was always there. It rumbled. It poured over you, thick as molasses. It sounded regal, even when he was playing a humble ex-ball player and not a king. It was always unmistakably his – he was not even credited as the voice of Darth Vader in the first two star Wars films, but everyone knew it of course – and yet he was remarkably versatile within what could have been a limited basso profundo range. He could be the epitome of evil as Vader, a clear figure of goodness and reason as King Mufasa in The Lion Kingor a sign of the value of journalism and democracy than the man who declared in a ubiquitous series of commercials, “This… is CNN.” The voice made such an impression that when Luke Skywalker took off Vader’s helmet at the end Return of the JediMany viewers were dismayed to see the face of the older white English actor Sebastian Shaw and not Jones’ own distinctive visage. (Or even that of another black actor.)

In almost every other live-action role Jones played during his long and distinguished career, the voice went hand in hand with the body it came from. Jones took up space in every way imaginable. He was 6’2″ tall and broad as a barn, even when he was young and slender enough to voice fighter Jack Johnson in his breakout role in The great white hope. Actors are generally smaller than you’d think, and so Jones tended to tower over his co-stars both physically and verbally. And when he wanted to – actually, when he was allowed to, in a career that made him a worldwide icon but was in many ways far more limited than his talent deserved – he could knock people off the screen with his basic dramatic or comedic talents as a performer, no matter his size or voice.

With the news that Jones has died at the age of 93, we naturally think first of that voice: of him almost purring as Vader tells a subordinate, “I find your lack of faith disturbing,” or of him in Field of Dreams and solemnly declared that baseball “reminds us of all that was once good and could be good again.” But limiting the discussion to this amazing instrument diminishes the other talents and overall legacy of a man who was a giant in many ways.

You probably already know a lot about Jones’ origin story, including the fact that this man with the golden voice stuttered so badly as a child that he was too embarrassed to introduce himself to strangers. He overcame this struggle through his art (starting with reading poetry in high school English class) and eventually became a respected Broadway actor; his film debut in Dr. Strangelove came about because director Stanley Kubrick saw George C. Scott in a production of The Merchant of Veniceand was taken with Scott’s imposing young co-star. In 1968, he won a Tony for the original stage production of The great white hopewas only the second black nominee for the Oscar for Best Actor after Sidney Poitier when the film was made into a movie in 1970.

This imposing screen presence proved to be a double-edged sword during Jones’ film career, but especially in the beginning. He was not classically handsome like Poitier – although he did appear in films such as the baseball comedy The Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars and Motor Kings — So leading roles were harder to come by. But he was such a striking camera subject and so charismatic that he often risked overshadowing any actor asked to stand near him. Because of his stage background, and because his voice and bearing made him seem so aristocratic, he often fell into the same trap as black stars who followed him, like Morgan Freeman: Too often he was cast for the authority and dignity he exuded, rather than because a filmmaker had a complicated character he wanted Jones to explore.

However, when given the chance to play people instead of symbols, Jones was a miracle.

Field of Dreams was the middle of three classic baseball movies in which he appeared over the years (the other was The sandbank). As is often the case, it is not his film. Kevin Costner is the star, he gets the big emotional arc, gets to play with the ghost of his deceased father while crying, gets to be a movie star in the best sense of the word, etc. And Jones absolutely steals the film from under him.

In the book Field of Dreams based on Shoeless Joerecruits Costner’s character Ray Kinsella The Catcher in the Rye Author J.D. Salinger helped him with his quest to add some magic to a baseball field in an Iowa cornfield. Salinger threatened to sue if his name was mentioned in the film, so writer-director Phil Alden Robinson had to create a character who would inspire a similar level of awe. Much of that was accomplished simply by having James Earl Jones play author Terence Mann. But Robinson and Jones also let Mann be hilariously irritable (“I’ll beat you with a crowbar until you go,” says the exasperated author Ray at their first meeting), palpably weary of an inheritance he never asked for, and genuinely delighted to have the ghosts of Shoeless Joe Jackson and Mel Ott playing a game before him. As Robinson’s camera zooms in, James Horner’s score shoots up and Mann begins his speech about the beauty and value of baseball.

Everett Collection The one part of the speech and the film that was never quite right, especially since the characters Jones played Bingo Long And

The sandbank

were both modeled on legendary Negro Leagues hitter Josh Gibson: All baseball players who get a chance on Ray’s field are white, not men like Gibson, who were barred from playing against people like Shoeless Joe because of the color of their skin. And a character played by Jones delivers this paean to the purity of baseball without making even the slightest allusion to that fact. Like many great actors who were repeatedly denied leading roles in the movies, Jones tried his hand at television several times and in 1991 became one of the few actors to win two Emmys in the same year, for a television movie about the riots in Watts entitled Heatwaveand for the leading role in Gabriel’s Firea short-lived private detective drama about a man who is released from prison after serving 20 years for a murder he didn’t commit. From his first Emmy-nominated role (as a financially struggling husband and father facing a family tragedy in the ’60s social worker drama) East side, west side, far) to his last (as a miner and jazz pianist in some episodes of the early Aughts family drama

Everwood ), he gave everything that was asked of him. Gabriel’s Firewas a rare case where executives looked at Jones in serious actor mode and wondered if they should let him be funnier; after the first season, the series was revamped into a much more light-hearted series called pros and conswith Jones and Richard Crenna playing the same characters in both. This version, however, only lasted half a season and made it harder for Jones to put his metaphorical fool’s cap back on in the future. But he found opportunities to play around with his own image whenever possible. In the second episode of Sesame Streethe recited the alphabet in his familiar stentorian voice. He played the voice of Maggie Simpson in an episode of “Treehouse of Horror” and indulged his penchant for being cast as authority figures by playing the boss in the “Mathnet” segments of the public-service math show. First place . In the early 1990s, he directed a series of television commercials for Bell Telephone’s Yellow Pages, each script clearly written with the knowledge of who would deliver lines like “This is the book that got Bubba cooking.” And Mufasa wasn’t even the first African monarch Jones had played, as The Lion Kingwas initiated by his mischievous role as arrogant King Jaffe Joffer in Eddie Murphy’s 1988 Charmer

. PopularHe reprised the role in the 2021 sequel Coming to America 2but most of his recent film roles were only voice acting, including the role of Mufasa in the CGI Lion King and Vader in various star Wars Movies and shows. The last of them, in 2022 Obi-Wan Kenobi series, is credited to Jones, but he didn’t actually work on it; by that point, he had assigned the rights to Lucasfilm to digitally recreate his voice for future projects, and an AI program created the new Vader dialogue based on his previous work. Like much of that show, the Vader voice was similar to what we know from previous

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