James Earl Jones has passed away....

A great actor with a commanding voice has died, he will be truly missed too?!!

The honorary Oscar recipient and two-time Tony winner overcame a stutter to stand out in such films as 'The Great White Hope,' 'The Lion King,' 'Field of Dreams' and 'The Sandlot.'

James Earl Jones, a commanding presence onscreen who nonetheless gained greater fame off-camera as the sonorous voice of Star Wars villain Darth Vader and Mufasa, the benevolent leader in The Lion King, died Monday. He was 93.

Jones, who burst into national prominence in 1970 with his powerful Oscar-nominated performance as America’s first Black heavyweight champion in The Great White Hope, died at his home in Dutchess County, New York, Independent Artist Group announced.

The distinguished star made his big-screen debut in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and was noteworthy in many other films, including Claudine (1974) opposite Diahann Carroll; Field of Dreams (1989), as the reclusive author Terence Mann; and The Sandlot (1993), as the intimidating neighborhood guy Mr. Mertle.
For his work on the stage, Jones earned two best actor Tony Awards: for originating the role of Jack Jefferson — who was based on real-life boxer Jack Johnson — in 1968 in Howard Sackler’s Great White Hope and for playing the patriarch who struggles to provide for his family in a 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning production of August Wilson’s Fences.

Jones, the recipient of an honorary Oscar at the 2011 Governors Awards and a special Tony for lifetime achievement in 2017, was one of the handful of people to earn an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony and the first actor to win two Emmys in one year.

“You cannot be an actor like I am and not have been in some of the worst movies like I have,” the self-deprecating star said when he was given his Academy Award. “But I stand before you deeply honored, mighty grateful and just plain gobsmacked.”

Jones’ rise to become one of the most-admired American actors of all time was remarkable considering he suffered from a debilitating stutter as a child.

Born Todd Jones on Jan. 17, 1931, he grew up in Arkabutla, Mississippi, and was raised by his maternal grandparents. At age 5, the family moved to a farm in Dublin, Michigan.
“That move was traumatic somehow,” he once recalled. “My ability to communicate dropped out. I couldn’t speak to people without breaking up and stuttering,” and he pretended to be mute.

When an English teacher in high school encouraged Jones to read a poem to the class that he had written, he discovered that his stutter vanished whenever he spoke words that he had memorized. He won a public-speaking contest as a senior and earned a full scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he studied medicine and discovered acting.

He made his stage debut in a community theater production in Manistee, Michigan, before he left to serve in the Korean War.

After being discharged, Jones moved to New York to pursue theater and made his Broadway debut in 1958 in Sunrise at Campobello, the Tony winner for best play that was written by Dory Schary and starred Ralph Bellamy as polio-stricken President Franklin Roosevelt.
Jones told THR in 2011 that his career was guided by words that his father, Robert Earl Jones — an actor who had been blacklisted from the industry by the House Un-American Activities Committee but appeared in The Sting — told him when he was just starting out.

“If you want to do this business, you gotta do it because you love it, not because it’s gonna make you rich or famous. That was the best advice he could give me,” he said.

Kubrick cast Jones as Lt. Lothar Zogg, a member of the B-52 bomber crew, in Dr. Strangelove after spotting him in New York in a Shakespeare in the Park production.

“George C. Scott was playing Shylock when Kubrick came to look him over,” he recalled in a January 2014 interview. “I was also in the play, as the Prince of Morocco, and Kubrick said, ‘I’ll take the Black one, too.’ That’s not what he actually said, but that’s the way I like to put it.”

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/james-earl-jones-dead-darth-vader-1235996060/

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Rest in Peace Sir!
 
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