11th September, 2024
By Ademola Adegbamigbe
He had a commanding presence. The voice of James Earl Jones, African American actor, who died at his home in Pawling, New York, on September 9, 2024, at the age of 93, also added immeasurably to his dignity of bearing. Not a few Nigerians would remember him as King Jaffe Joffer of Zamunda in Eddie Murphy’s movie, Coming to America. His barking reception shows also in the movie where he tells the audience at his palace who came for Hakeem’s wedding to, “Let them wait, I am talking to my son.”
When Jones was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, in 1931, he was a stammerer. Stammering also known as Stuttering, is, as contained in a World Health Organisation publication, a speech disorder “characterized externally by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words, or phrases as well as involuntary silent pauses or blocks in which the person who stutters is unable to produce sounds.” Not a man to be weighed down by any challenge, his biographers quoted Jones as saying that poetry and acting “helped him overcome the challenges of his disability.”
It was that voice that, among other endowments, took him to places. “This is CNN,” the international network’s tagline, was the voice of Jones. This was confirmed by CNN, in a statement that he “was the voice of CNN and our brand for many decades, uniquely conveying through speech instant authority, grace, and decorum. That remarkable voice is just one of many things the world will miss about James.” Still on his voice, apart from his alma mater, the University of Michigan, paying tribute to him by posting a “We Are Michigan” video narrated by Jones on X, he lent his voice to the opening for NBC’s coverage of the 2000 and 2004 Summer Olympics and narrated all 27 books of the New Testament in the audiobook James Earl Jones Reads the Bible. Not only that, movie critics said Jones’s voice is that of Darth Vader at the conclusion of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005). According to Jonah McKeown in Catholic News of September 10, 2024, in 1985, Jones lent his bass voice as Pharaoh in the first episode of Hanna-Barbera’s The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible.
Ann Hornaday, in her September 25, 2014 washingtonpost.com article, James Earl Jones: A voice for the ages, aging gracefully” wrote: “His deep voice was praised as a ‘stirring basso profondo that has lent gravel and gravitas” to his projects. He also lent his distinctive bass voice to the role of Mufasa in the 1994 Disney animated film The Lion King.
As a national figure, praises are coming the way of Jones in torrents. As Karren Butler put it in The United Press International of September 10, the Empire State Building in New York City was lit up to look like Jones’s iconic Darth Vader villain from “Star Wars”. Vice President Kamala Harris was not left out. She wrote on her X handle today: “Jones used his voice to challenge America’s thinking on civil rights and race, and he continued to move our nation forward through his art.” Former President Bill Clinton released a statement praising Jones as “a brilliant actor who brought to life some of the most iconic characters ever”.
His colleagues in Hollywood showered praises on him. Actor Denzel Washington also called him a “hero” saying further, “I wasn’t going to be as big as him. I wanted to sound like him. He was everything to me as a budding actor. He was who I wanted to be.”
Entertainment Weekly published a story on September 10, entitled “Celebrities and costars mourn James Earl Jones: ‘Rest now, King'”. That is, numerous members of the entertainment industry also paid tribute to Jones including Kevin Costner, Mark Hamill, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Barry Jenkins, Spike Lee, Viola Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, Courtney B. Vance, Octavia Spencer, Jeffrey Wright, Jamie Foxx, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Rosario Dawson, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Uzo Aduba, Alec Baldwin, Danny DeVito, William Shatner, Disney CEO Bob Iger, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, and Lucasfilm founder George Lucas.
The New York Times’ Robert D McFadden described Jones’s career as a “a prodigious body of work” and called him “one of America’s most versatile actors in a stage, film and television career”. The Hollywood Reporter referred to Jones as “one of the most-admired American actors of all time”. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote, “like Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte or Paul Robeson, [Jones] was an African American actor with a beautiful voice which was the key to his dignity and self-respect as a performer; it was how his characters rose above racism and cruelty”, and described Jones as “movie royalty”.
Robert D. McFadden narrated the story of James Earl Jones’s childhood was born in The New York Times of September 9. 2024. It was in an article, “James Earl Jones, Whose Powerful Acting Resonated Onstage and Onscreen, Dies at 93”. Jones was born to Ruth (née Connolly); (1911–1986), a teacher and maid, and Robert Earl Jones (1910–2006), a boxer, butler, and chauffeur. “His father left the family shortly after James Earl’s birth and later became a stage and screen actor in New York and Hollywood. Jones and his father did not get to know each other until the 1950s, when they reconciled. He said in interviews that his parents were both of mixed African-American, Irish, and Native American ancestry.”
Andrew Davies-Cole wrote an article in Herald Scotland on of February 18, 2010, entitled “The daddy of them all” that from the age of five, Jones was raised by his maternal grandparents, John Henry and Maggie Connollyon their farm in Dublin, Michigan; they had moved from Mississippi in the Great Migration. Jones found the transition to living with his grandparents in Michigan traumatic and developed a stutter so severe that he refused to speak. He said, ‘I was a stutterer. I couldn’t talk. So my first year of school was my first mute year, and then those mute years continued until I got to high school.’ He credited his English teacher, Donald Crouch, who discovered he had a gift for writing poetry, with helping him end his silence. Crouch urged him to challenge his reluctance to speak through reading poetry aloud to the class.” In 1949, Jones graduated from Dickson Rural Agricultural School (now Brethren High School) in Brethren, Michigan, where he served as vice president of his class.[21]
According to many biographical writing on him, aggregated by Wikipedia, he attended the University of Michigan, where he was initially a pre-med major. He joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and excelled. He felt comfortable within the structure of the military environment and enjoyed the camaraderie of his fellow cadets in the Pershing Rifles Drill Team and Scabbard and Blade Honor Society. After his junior year, he focused on drama with the thought of doing something he enjoyed, before, he assumed, he would have to go off to fight in the Korean War.
His biographers went further that Jones was known for his film roles and his work in theater. He was one of the few performers to achieve the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony). He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1985, and was honored with the National Medal of Arts in 1992, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2002, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2009, and the Academy Honorary Award in 2011.
He then gained prominence for acting in numerous productions with Shakespeare in the Park including Othello, Hamlet, Coriolanus, and King Lear. Jones worked steadily in theater, winning the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his role as a boxer in The Great White Hope (1968),
Jones made his film debut in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). He received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Claudine (1974). Jones gained international fame for his voice role as Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, beginning with the original 1977 film. Jones’s other notable films include The Man (1972), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Matewan (1987), Coming to America (1988), Field of Dreams (1989), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Sneakers (1992), The Sandlot (1993), The Lion King (1994), and Cry, the Beloved Country (1995). On television, Jones received eight Primetime Emmy Awards nominations winning twice for his roles in thriller film Heat Wave (1990) and the crime series Gabriel’s Fire (1991). He also acted in Roots (1977), Jesus of Nazareth (1977), Picket Fences (1994), Homicide: Life on the Street (1997), and Everwood (2004).
Jones appeared in several more successful films during the early-to-mid-1990s, including The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992), The Sandlot (1993), Clear and Present Danger (1994),and Cry, the Beloved Country (1995).
