(CNN) – You can’t think of James Earl Jones without hearing his voice. That rumbling basso profundo, which conveys dignity or menace in an instant, was his signature instrument. Jones brought power to all of his film and stage roles, most notably as Darth Vader in “Star Wars,” Mufasa in “The Lion King” and as the voice of CNN.
That extraordinary voice is just one of the many things the world will miss about the beloved actor, who died Monday, according to his agent. He was 93.
Jones had a distinguished career that spanned some 60 years and took him from the theater of a small town in northern Michigan to the top of Hollywood, where he appeared in dozens of films and television series. (He also lent his voice to CNN’s catchphrase, “This is CNN,” with a dramatic pause after “This…”).
The great career of James Earl Jones, the great voice of Hollywood
In the mid-1970s, “Star Wars” creator George Lucas cast towering British actor David Prowse to play the man in the black suit, Darth Vader, but decided he wanted someone else to voice the character.
“George thought I wanted a darker — pardon the expression — voice,” Jones once told the American Film Institute. “I got lucky.”
At the time, no one imagined that “Star Wars” would become a box office hit, let alone an enduring franchise and cultural phenomenon. Jones recorded all of his lines in just a few hours and was not credited for the film. He said he was paid only $7,000 for the movie, “and I thought that was good money.”
The actor and Lucas had disagreements over how the villain Vader should be voiced.
“I wanted to make Darth Vader more interesting, more subtle, more psychological,” Jones said. “He (Lucas) said, ‘No, no… you have to keep his voice in a very narrow band of inflection, because it’s not human.”
Darth Vader’s climactic duel with Luke Skywalker in “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) became the high point of the “Star Wars” series, punctuated by Jones’ utterance of one of the most famous lines in film history: “No, I am your father.”
Jones says that nearly two decades later, when he voiced the dignified Mufasa for Disney’s animated film “The Lion King,” he struggled a bit to find the right tone.
“My first mistake was trying to give it a royal tone,” Jones said of the 1994 film“And what they really needed was something more like me. They said, ‘What are you like as a father?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m actually a goofball father.’”
“And so they began to impose my facial expressions on Mufasa, and a different tone of voice. Yes, he was authoritarian, but he was a tender father.”
Jones was born in 1931 in Mississippi. His father, Robert Earl Jones, abandoned the family before James was born to become an actor in New York and Hollywood, working with playwright Langston Hughes and eventually landing supporting roles in hit films such as “The Sting.”
Jones’ family moved from Mississippi to Michigan when he was 5, a traumatic disorder that caused him to stutter. His fear of speaking rendered him nearly mute until he reached high school, where a poetry teacher helped him overcome his disability by encouraging him to read his poems aloud.
“It started to challenge me, to encourage me to speak again… to recognize and appreciate the beauty of words,” says Jones.
Jones studied drama at the University of Michigan, served as an Army Ranger and moved to New York, where he soon landed leading roles in Shakespearean stage productions. He made his film debut in 1964 as a bombardier in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.”
In 1967, Jones played the troubled boxer Jack Johnson in a stage production of “The Great White Hope,” a role that changed his career and earned him a Tony Award. Three years later he reprised the role in the film adaptation, becoming only the second African-American, after Sidney Poitier, to be nominated for an Oscar.
By the mid-1970s, Jones was working tirelessly in film and television, a prolific career that never waned. Over the next five decades, he played many memorable roles: Alex Haley in the television series “Roots: The Next Generations”warlord Thulsa Doom in “Conan the Barbarian,” an African king in “Coming to America,” Kevin Costner’s reluctant recruit in “Field of Dreams,” Admiral Greer in “The Hunt for Red October” and “Patriot Games” and a South African preacher in “Cry, the Beloved Country.”
In 2019, he reprised his role as Mufasa in Disney’s remake of The Lion King, becoming the only cast member to reprise his role from the first film.
Over the years he also starred in dozens of television series, from “L.A. Law” to “Sesame Street,” appeared regularly on stage and lent his deep, booming voice to everything from “The Simpsons” to a popular audio recording of the King James Version of the Bible.
Jones said that people in public sometimes didn’t recognize him until they heard his voice.
“When you don’t talk it’s like being a ninja,” he told Rachael Ray in 2016. “You get in the cab and say where you’re going and the guy turns around and says, ‘Hey, aren’t you that Darth Vader guy? ‘”
Throughout her long and prolific career, Jones won three Tonys, two Emmys, a Grammy, a Golden Globe and numerous other awards.
“It wasn’t acting. It was language. It was speech,” he replied when asked what sparked his passion for acting. “It was what… I had denied myself all those years (as a child). Now I had a great appreciation for it, an abnormal appreciation.”
“And it was the idea that you can do a play – like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever – and say things that you could never imagine yourself saying, that you would never imagine yourself thinking in your own life,” said to the Academy of Achievement in 1996.
“You could say those things! That’s what it’s all about, whether it’s in film, television or whatever. That’s what it’s all about.”