The Vast Universes of James Earl Jones’s Voice

You might not have really known him, but you knew his voice. This is obvious and also essential. That timbre wormed its way into our lives, to the point we forgot the sound of a world without it. Where it came from was another matter. Harder to know and harder to tell. This had the rare effect of fostering both familiarity and remove, making him a presence in a character-hungry world even when he wasn’t. Such is the paradox of James Earl Jones: The voice revealed only so much of the man, but when he spoke, the endless scope of human imagination spilled out.

He made certain of that. Two-hundred-plus on-screen credits. A footprint on Broadway as wide as the street. He roused legends from typewritten ink. Flesh and blood, drawn and animated, off-screen and artificial, but always—herein lie the gift, meal ticket, and purpose—heard.

In The Sandlot, the idea that Jones’s blind former Negro Leaguer rubbed shoulders with Babe Ruth (the Sultan of Swat, the King of Crash, the Colossus of Clout, the Great Bambino) has never once strained credulity for me even now—because Jones was the messenger. Only he could smooth the contradictions between the purposefully out-of-touch regality in Coming to America and the Serengeti-wise guidance of Lion King’s Mufasa. Only he could spend a decade moonlighting as August Wilson’s acolyte or Othello or Lear and, also, the single most famous villain in cinema—the immortal voice of a certain faceless, laser-swinging space wizard.

The unifying theory of James Earl Jones—a long-shot, overlooked misfit who spoke his way onto America’s stages, movie theaters, and TV screens—is him and him alone. Give Jones the chance, and he’d utter any story into being, even his own. On Monday, after 93 years, the world went a different kind of quiet. Jones died, surrounded by family, at his home in the Hudson Valley.

Jones forged his voice, much as he did his acting career, through doubt, discomfort, and determination. As a boy, he didn’t speak. Born in 1931 in Arkabutla, Mississippi, and raised by his grandparents on a farm in Dublin, Michigan, Jones developed a stutter after his birth parents disappeared from his life. In hindsight he would often explicitly peg that upheaval to the speech impediment. “I really feel the being ripped from the soil is what set me into a state of trauma,” he told an interviewer in 1996. “By the time I got to Michigan, I was a stutterer.”

Jones was, in his own words, functionally “mute,” introverted, and lonely until high school. His interest in the theater blossomed after poetry recitals in an English class helped him remaster basic speech. After enrolling first as a premed student and then as a drama major at the University of Michigan, Jones spent two years domestically in the Army Reserve. Following his honorable discharge, Jones bounced between odd jobs—a gig at a local diner, janitorial work—before trying to make a living as an actor.

He was cast in his first few plays at a tiny theater on the banks of Lake Michigan, but soon he relocated to Manhattan and found roles in off-Broadway shows. In the early ’60s, Jones appeared onstage alongside future luminaries Cicely Tyson and Louis Gossett Jr., each actor searching for stability in an industry that often devalued and dismissed Black voices. In 1964 he was cast, albeit for a limited role, in Stanley Kubrick’s atomic reckoning Dr. Strangelove. Afterward Jones appeared in multiple soap operas, often filling the role of a smoothly competent young doctor.

By the time Jones finally reached widespread critical acclaim on the stage, he was most associated with a series of Shakespeare renditions. In 1969, he received his first Tony Award for playing the protagonist in The Great White Hope—a play based on the life of former world champion boxer Jack Johnson. The next year he received his first Academy Award nomination after he was cast in a film adaptation of the same work. (He’d eventually join the short list of EGOT winners, noncompetitive division.) His life changed forever in 1977 when he was cast as Darth Vader in Star Wars, thanks partially to George Lucas’s last-minute whims, but even more because of the confluence of that opportunity with the sheer level of skill he’d accumulated across decades. Those daddy issues don’t land the same with a man less fluent in the language of Greek tragedy and pulp drama, among other forms of communication. Beat a stutter for your first act, and it ain’t all that much to pass for the chosen one.

Even after securing mainstream success in a galaxy far, far away, Jones was always honing his craft, always searching for the next project. In the 1980s, he connected with the playwright August Wilson and won his second Tony for the 1987 debut of Fences. Two years later, he alone may not have built Field of Dreams, but his presence as an iconoclastic writer and dormant lover of baseball among a bunch of ghosts taking batting practice ensured that audiences came. From 1988—the year Jones appeared bedecked in “Zamundan” gold and faux-leopard fineries for Coming to America—until 2001, he appeared in about a movie per year. (In 1994 he got to have his artiste cake and eat it too when Disney cast him as Mufasa in Hamlet The Lion King.) Sometimes he went on The Simpsons or even, in his later years, spaces as seemingly incongruous as The Big Bang Theory—always game to brandish that thunderous voice as a vessel to prod his own image and work. He was revered enough to be the literal voice of CNN, but still game to go on Letterman and poke fun at that seriousness.

He was, even into his later years, a masterful performer, with preternatural comedic instincts; the rare thespian as skilled handling the classics as he was with network guest appearances and big-tent character reprisals. In 2019’s Lion King remake, he may have kept it short and sweet on dialogue, but when he opened his mouth he still outshined a few pop stars, one of them being Beyoncé. His ability to imbue his characters with a taciturn serenity was about the only good thing in what ended up being Jones’s final film, 2021’s Coming 2 America. His speech was his skeleton key to unlocking so many genres, mediums, audiences. From afar, what amazed me most about Jones was how he wielded not just the tone of his voice but also its volume to unsettle listeners’ expectations of who the man behind it actually was. To so convincingly cast the illusion that nothing—a stutter, fickle caste systems, stiff conventions of genre or precedent—could hold him. Not until that actually became true.

In this way, Jones made me think of my grandfather: Like Jones, he was a tall, broad, Southern-born ruffian who lived into his 90s and had a voice that could sound at once as powerful as the tides and as delicate as a lily. When he opened his mouth, people within earshot heard an army veteran, a courtroom orator, the lion of some vast lineage across space and time (each true, in one way or another). But what I heard was a man not above trying to convince a prying grandson that he’d descended from some mystic beanstalk in search of “bones” to make his “bread.” A man who loved nothing more than to hear each of his many beloveds giggle in his face because they were just too much like him to believe him. He could fool everyone else in the world, but those who knew him could spot the light in his voice. I did not know James Earl Jones, but, like so many, I was privileged to hear him.

You don’t forget a sound like that.