Offscreen Notes
James Earl Jones (1931 - 2024)
“When you wake up in the morning, before you look in the mirror, do you see an ethnicity? I don’t—and if I did, I’d be in trouble, because that has blinded me to who I might really be. Even waking up seeing myself as a male blinds me to who I might really be.”—James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones was an interesting and likable actor: a force of nature, he could play doctors and ministers and writers, men who represented culture and morality, as well as gutsy, sensual laborers. Jones gave strong performances in Claudine (1974), The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976), Matewan (1987), and, among others, Field of Dreams (1989) and Cry, the Beloved Country (1995). James Earl Jones had a distinctive voice, for which he became famous as an actor and a narrator for a variety of artistic and commercial projects. Yet, it was a voice he had not always used. Jones published a thoughtful biography, James Earl Jones, Voices and Silences in collaboration with the scholar Penelope Niven, an expert on Thornton Wilder: direct and honest, James, the son of actor and boxer Robert Earl Jones but reared by his grandparents, recalled his Mississippi childhood, his challenges (vocal difficulties, including a severe stutter that led to a period of silence), and his training with the American Theatre Wing; and he tells the stories behind his accomplishments, while offering sometimes surprising responses to artistic and social issues. James Earl Jones had been an English major at the University of Michigan, and he began to explore drama. In 1957, Jones debuted in Sunrise at Campobello, a play about Franklin Roosevelt and the onset of the politician’s polio. In 1964, Jones starred in Othello for Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park. James Earl Jones’s late 1960s Broadway appearance as a version of boxing champion Jack Johnson and his fight with the white boxer Jim Jeffries—but Johnson is renamed Jack Jefferson—in The Great White Hope, written by Howard Sackler and directed by Edwin Sherin. The play had premiered in Washington, D.C., in 1967, before moving to Broadway in 1968, and that was the actor’s first great success; and Jones would appear in a film of the play in 1970, directed by Martin Ritt, who like filmmakers King Vidor, John Berry, and John Sayles had a liberal humanist orientation and presented black actors and characters of complexity and dignity, a transcendent perspective (when many others were still offering stereotypes). In Claudine (John Berry, 1974), Jones plays a sanitation worker who becomes engaged with Diahann Carroll as the working mother of several children—it is a believably realistic yet lovely and memorable film. The lives of ordinary people are explored for their depth, their humor, their challenges and their loves. The performance of James Earl Jones as a minister who must come to terms with the troubling realities of apartheid South Africa in Cry, the Beloved Country (Darrell Roodt, 1995) -- Jones shows persuasive restraint and resonance as a minister whose spiritual calm is shaken by the circumstances of his son's disappearance and trouble. He would continue appearing onstage, and in films and on television. Jones became even better known for his voice work as Darth Vader in Star Wars (1977, 1980, 1983); and as the voice of Mufasa in The Lion King (1994 and 2019). Jones was part of a tradition of actors that included men such as Paul Robeson and Canada Lee and Sidney Poitier, a tradition that includes Morgan Freeman, Danny Glover, Laurence Fishburne, Forest Whitaker, Dennis Haysbert, Blair Underwood, Seth Gilliam, Jeffrey Wright, Ving Rhames, Jamie Foxx, Terry Crews, and, among many others, Jonathan Majors and Jocko Sims—men who sometimes worked with little encouragement to deliver work of dignity, intelligence, and social value. James Earl However, Jones was the recipient of various awards, the Tony (for The Great White Hope and Fences), the Grammy (for Great American Documents), and the Emmy (after being nominated for the 1960s East Side/West Side, Jones won twice in 1994 for the series Gabriel’s Fire and the mini-series Heat Wave)—and he got an Academy Award (Oscar) for lifetime achievement in 2011. Jones starred with Cicely Tyson in a stage production of The Gin Game in 2015; and was King Jaffe Joffer in the film Coming 2 America (2021). Let us remember, revere, and rediscover the work of James Earl Jones (January 17, 1931 – September 9, 2024), a significant artist.
Daniel Garrett
