James Earl Jones, Field of Dreams actor and iconic voice of Darth Vader, dies at 93

James Earl Jones, whose talents were as beloved as his iconic voice, died Monday morning at his home in Dutchess County, N.Y. He was 93.

A representative for the actor told Entertainment Weekly that Jones was surrounded by his loved ones in his final moments, and remembered him as "a great man and actor."

For a brief moment in the late 1960s, Jones was the great Black hope of American movies. And he walked away.

Not that Jones disappeared. Far from it. No man who's 6 feet, 1 inch tall with a voice that can rumble the far reaches of the universe can be expected to fade into the background. But Jones had the entertainment industry at his feet when his scalding portrayal of boxer Jack Jefferson in The Great White Hope on Broadway in 1968 and on screen in 1970, which led to a Tony Award, an Oscar nomination, a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer, and the kind of reviews and public acclaim a young actor can only dream of. He was on the cover of Newsweek. He won a Grammy for recording the play.

Immediately, Jones was offered every major African American role lying around in the early '70s, up to and including Shaft. He balked at almost all of them. ''I didn't want to be good-looking, I didn't want to be handsome,'' he told the Washington Post in 2002 about his resistance to the star-making machinery. ''I was being groomed for Hollywood, and I started to balloon, like my friend Marlon.''

Instead, Jones saw himself as a character actor, and he retreated to the stage, which was always his first love, working hard and using it as a home base for rich, occasional forays into film. He played Othello on the boards countless times and won another Tony for his bitter patriarch in August Wilson's 1985 Fences. And eventually the instrument Jones developed there­ — a resonant basso profundo that carried majesty and subtlety in its velvet folds — proved the key to financial success and an eternal spot in the pop culture pantheon.

The man was the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars, for Pete's sake. He was the voice of The Lion King's Mufasa. With those two roles alone, he terrified and soothed the nation's small fry, but Jones also did so many commercial voice-overs, and with such benevolent authority, that Madison Avenue finally just gave up and handed major accounts to him. When you heard ''This… is CNN,'' that… was James Earl Jones. Dial Verizon information on your phone, and there he was again — the most trustworthy pre-recording imaginable.

This is amazing when you learn the young Jones stuttered so painfully that for most of his childhood he talked only to the family dog. Born in rural Mississippi on Jan. 17, 1931, he was sent to live with his grandparents in Michigan after his father left to try his hand as an actor. That trauma brought on Jones' speech difficulties, and only the intervention of a caring teacher during the boy's adolescence coaxed Jones out of his shell, Jones later said. Initially able to communicate with schoolmates only by writing, he joined the debating team and won oratorical prizes. He cut his new vocal chops on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Longfellow. He began to consider a career in acting.

Jones' grandfather was a farmer who viewed the stage with scorn, but after stints at the University of Michigan and in the army, the young man found himself in New York, studying acting under the legendary Lee Strasberg. Jones had reconnected with his father by then, and although the paternal bond was irreparably damaged, the two lived together, scrabbling for bit parts while making ends meet varnishing floors. The elder Jones coached him in the role of Othello; the son would later write, ''I was apprenticing to a master, but an unfulfilled master.''

The lead in a 1961 off-Broadway revival of Jean Genet's The Blacks popped Jones loose, and he picked up a number of New York acting awards over the next few years. He also picked up his first movie role, as a bombardier in 1963's Dr. Strangelove, after director Stanley Kubrick came to see George C. Scott in a New York production, took a look at Jones in the cast, and, as Jones remembered it, said, ''I'll take the Black one, too.''

The cultural timing was right for his ascension. As Dr. Jerry Turner on As the World Turns in 1965, Jones became the first African American to play a regular role on a TV soap opera. Then came The Great White Hope, with the actor stunning critics and audiences alike. In the play, written by Howard Sackler and loosely based on the life of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, Jones used all his gifts to depict the pride and defiance of a larger-than-life athlete pounding away at a society that refuses him admittance.

In the aftermath of the movie, Jones played a Black American president in The Man (1972) and Diahann Carroll's garbageman boyfriend in Claudine (1974) — a role that gave him another Golden Globe and great personal satisfaction — but he put most of his energies into stage roles, both abroad and with New York's Public Theatre under Joseph Papp.

The role for which he'll probably be most remembered, that of Darth Vader's scuba-gear vocal chords in 1977's Star Wars: A New Hope, was literally a day job: two hours of recording and $7,000 in pay. George Lucas was considering Orson Welles for the part, Jones told the Washington Post, ''but he thought Welles might be too recognizable. So he picks a guy from Mississippi, with a stutter.''

He reprised the role in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983)­ — this time with a percentage of the gross — and later returned for projects including Revenge of the Sith (2005), The Rise of Skywalker (2019), and the 2014-2016 TV series Star Wars Rebels. Jones officially stepped down from the role of Vader in 2022, and gave his permission to Lucasfilm to use archival recordings and AI technology to replicate his voice for the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi.

As for his other legacy voice-over character, Jones first played Mufasa in the 1994 animated film The Lion King, then returned for the animated sequel The Lion King II: Simba's Pride in 1998, the animated TV movie The Lion Guard: Return of the Roar in 2015, and once more for 2019's live-action Lion King remake.

Jones also made further inroads in TV, playing author Alex Haley in Roots: The Next Generation (1979) and testing the series waters in short-lived crime dramas like 1979’s Paris and 1990’s Gabriel's Fire. He also appeared in the TNT drama Agent X in 2015.

He kept busy in movies as well, always an august character presence. His most recent big-screen roles were the 2018 action-thriller Warning Shot and Coming 2 America, the 2021 sequel to the 1988 comedy classic Coming to America.

Jones' most indelible late-era film role may be Terence Mann, the tormented cult novelist and Red Sox freak whom Kevin Costner brings along for the ride in Field of Dreams (1989). As with so many of the men Jones played, that character begins in frosty reluctance and flowers into warmth, and then that voice booms out, covering everything with seasoned joy. It won't fade for a very long time.