Breaking News: James Earl Jones has died at 93. He gave life to characters like Darth Vader in “Star Wars” and Mufasa in “The Lion King,” and went on to collect Tonys, Golden Globes, Emmys and an honorary Oscar for a prodigious body of work… see more

James Earl Jones, Actor Whose Voice Could Menace or Melt, Dies at 93
He gave life to characters like Darth Vader in “Star Wars” and Mufasa in “The Lion King,” and went on to collect Tonys, Golden Globes, Emmys and an honorary Oscar.

James Earl Jones, a stuttering farm child who became a voice of rolling thunder as one of America’s most versatile actors in a stage, film and television career that plumbed race relations, Shakespeare’s rhapsodic tragedies and the faceless menace of Darth Vader, died on Monday at his home in Dutchess County, N.Y. He was 93.

The office of his agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed the death in a statement.

From destitute days working in a diner and living in a $19-a-month cold-water flat, Mr. Jones climbed to Broadway and Hollywood stardom with talent, drive and remarkable vocal cords. He was abandoned as a child by his parents, raised by a racist grandmother and mute for years in his stutterer’s shame, but he learned to speak again with a herculean will. All had much to do with his success.

So did plays by Howard Sackler and August Wilson that let a young actor explore racial hatred in the national experience; television soap operas that boldly cast a Black man as a doctor in the 1960s; and a decision by George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars,” to put an anonymous, rumbling African American voice behind the grotesque mask of the galactic villain Vader.

The rest was accomplished by Mr. Jones himself: a prodigious body of work that encompassed scores of plays, nearly 90 television network dramas and episodic series, and some 120 movies. They included his voice work, much of it uncredited, in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, in the credited voice-over of Mufasa in “The Lion King,” Disney’s 1994 animated musical film, and in his reprise of the role in Jon Favreau’s computer-animated remake in 2019.

He liked to portray kings and generals, garbage men and bricklayers; perform Shakespeare in Central Park and the works of August Wilson and Athol Fugard on Broadway. He could strut and court lecherously, erupt with rage or melt tenderly; play the blustering Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (2008) or an aging Norman Thayer Jr. in Ernest Thompson’s confrontation with mortality, “On Golden Pond” (2005).

Some theatergoers, aware of Mr. Jones’s childhood affliction, discerned occasional subtle hesitations in his delivery of lines. The pauses were deliberate, he said, a technique of self-restraint learned by stutterers to control involuntary repetitions. Far from detracting from his lucidity, the pauses usually added force to an emotional moment.