James Earl Jones, a highly regarded actor with an instantly recognizable deep voice, is dead at 93. Jones died at home in Dutchess County, according to his rep at Independent Artist Group. Embedded in pop culture as the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, Jones was a revered actor on stage and screen, earning two Tonys and two Emmys. He made his Broadway debut in 1958 at the former Cort Theatre, which now bears his name. Jones regularly appeared in plays over the next three decades, playing iconic roles such as King Lear, Othello, and Of Mice and Men’s Lennie. He earned his first Tony in 1969 for starring in the play The Great White Hope, and just a year later, in 1970, was nominated for his first Oscar in the film adaptation.
In the 1970s, Jones became legendary. He voiced Darth Vader in the first Star Wars film, A New Hope, in 1977, though he asked not to be credited because he only saw his role as “special effects.” Around the same time, he won a Best Spoken Word Album Grammy for reading the Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation on Great American Documents, alongside other notable voices such as Henry Fonda, Orson Welles, and Helen Hayes. He continued to voice Darth Vader in the two subsequent films, 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back and 1983’s Return of the Jedi. He starred in some of the other biggest films of the 1980s as well, including Conan the Barbarian, Coming to America, and Field of Dreams.
Jones won a second Tony for his role in the Broadway premiere of August Wilson’s Fences in 1987, before a decade-plus hiatus from the stage. He additionally won two Emmys in 1991 for starring in the short-lived crime drama Gabriel’s Fire along with his role in the TV film Heat Wave. In 1994, he took on another iconic voice role, voicing Mufasa in Disney’s The Lion King. Jones returned to Broadway in a 2005 production of On Golden Pond and eventually earned a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 2017. He also earned an Honorary Oscar in 2011, making him a non-competitive EGOT winner. Jones continued to voice Darth Vader in the recent Star Wars films Rogue One and The Rise of Skywalker but said he was retiring in 2022.
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