“If I hadn’t been a stutterer,” James Earl Jones once said, “I would never have been an actor.” It’s a counterintuitive statement on first glance, but it encapsulates Jones’s astonishing journey from silent schoolboy to revered actor.
James Earl Jones performed every sort of role across a decades-long, history-making career. On Broadway and off-Broadway, on stage and on screen, from Shakespeare to sci-fi, in bit parts and starring roles, in iconic films and “cheesy” movies, Jones’s distinctive, booming bass voice rang out.
He recorded all his lines in a couple of hours for Darth Vader in "Star Wars: A New Hope" and created one of the most iconic villains in film history. He wrote poetry, raised his son, and pushed back on identity politics. But one fascinating story from Jones’s childhood reveals not only a great deal about the actor he would become but also about the importance of having mentors who believe in you enough to help you overcome your greatest fears and handicaps.
“The desire to speak builds and builds until it becomes part of your life force,” Jones wrote in his biography, remembering his struggle from 12 years old into high school to overcome a bad stutter. Yet, “If I hadn’t been a stutterer,” Jones stated in 2014, “I would never have been an actor.”
Jones, who would later be praised by WaPo critic Peter Marks for having a voice “pitched in the key of heroism,” once was too afraid to speak aloud. Born in 1931 in Arkabutla, Miss., as the Los Angeles Times writes, he was the son of boxer/actor Robert Earl Jones — who left before James was born — and tailor Ruth Willians, who suffered from poor mental health. He was raised by his grandparents John Henry and Maggie Connolly and later moved with his family to Michigan. But at a young age, he developed the stutter that so eroded his self-confidence.
Young James started writing out notes instead of speaking aloud and remained silent and unnoticed in high school — except by one man, high school teacher Donald Crouch. Jones recalled that Crouch discovered his secret poetry-writing and said, “If you like words that much, James, you ought to be able to say them out loud.”
Crouch didn’t just give Jones an empty compliment and a pat on the back, the LA Times explains. The teacher did research on stutterers and discovered that reading aloud helps some overcome the speech issue. Crouch finally convinced James to try out this method. James was able to read in front of his class without stuttering! Crouch gave James a volume of Shakespeare to practice reading out loud and continue to overcome the stutter. Little did either of them know that James Earl Jones would one day star in multiple Shakespearean plays, as some of the Bard’s most iconic characters: Othello, King Lear, and Claudius (Hamlet).
“It was through poetry I began to speak that other language, where the R’s were rounded: Longfellow, Shakespeare, Chaucer,” Jones recalled, according to The Washington Post.
Jones always gave credit to Crouch for setting him on the path to dramatic success. Thanks to the high school teacher who believed in him, Jones eventually won a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he would get his theater degree, before serving his country in the U.S. Army for two years. Then Jones went to New York, met his own father for the first time in his life, and worked cleaning theaters and floors until he broke into show business as a warrior holding a spear in the Shakespearean play “Henry V.” But he wasn’t in the background for long, and with his starring role in the Broadway play “The Great White Hope,” Jones was on his way to stardom.
The teenager so shy he wrote notes instead of speaking became an international sensation for his ringing voice. He won two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe, a Grammy Award, three Tony Awards, a lifetime achievement award from the Motion Picture Academy for his “legacy of consistent excellence and uncommon versatility,” and an honorary Academy Award, according to LA Times and IMDb.
When Jones received Kennedy Center honors in 2002, George W. Bush joked that, despite the claim the president’s voice is the most recognized voice in the USA, “I’m not going to make that claim in the presence of James Earl Jones.”
I know and love him best as Mufasa in Disney’s “The Lion King” and Darth Vader in Lucas’s “Star Wars” movies, though I also admire his performance as Adm. Greer in “The Hunt for Red October.” I included clips from these memorable films in this article, along with a clip of Jones performing Shakespeare, the Bard who helped him come out of his shell as a youth.
Another aspect Jones’s greatness was his individualism and dislike of woke identity politics. WaPo notes that Jones once said, “The word I don’t like is ‘race.’ Black is obvious, ethnic is obvious. But race is the division between us all.” That’s a division he didn’t want to further. He was an actor who was black, not a “Black actor.”
In fact, while Jones was fully aware of the racism in America’s past (after all, he had broken ground in acting himself), he knew that past racism had not held him back. “You’ve got to play the culture, not the color,” he wisely observed. He was apparently fine with black Americans being seen as Europeans culturally, because that’s largely the culture that Americans inherited, though he appreciated African culture, too. In other words, he was honest without being bitter and irritated by the suggestion that skin color should segregate Americans.
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And fittingly for a man whose whole life was built around the spoken and written word, he saw language as defining culture far more than skin color. “Anybody can carry a picket sign,” he said in 2013, “but I think you should be able to articulate what that sign means.”
Throughout his life, Jones loved poetry, both writing it and reciting it. “The farther you get into language and articulation, the farther you get from emotion. You have to get back into song and poetry,” he said in 2002, according to the LA Times.
As critic Peter Marks once put it, Jones brought an “elemental force … to the stage.” After his death was announced, his co-stars from “Field of Dreams” and “Star Wars,” among many others in the entertainment industry, paid tribute to Jones. Not every role James Earl Jones ever played was memorable, but his voice, his acting, and his unique talents always were. Whether his voice belonged to an animated lion or a Shakespearean monarch, whether he was performing in commercials or classics, everyone recognized James Earl Jones, and his legacy will live on long after he has been laid to rest.
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