James Earl Jones, voice of Darth Vader and ‘Field of Dreams’ star, dead at 93

James Earl Jones, the voice of “Star Wars” villain Darth Vader, died at his Dutchess County, NY, home on Monday, Sept. 9, at the age of 93.

His reps at Independent Artist Group confirmed his death to Deadline.

Jones was the recipient of many awards throughout his lifetime, even scoring the rare EGOT honor with an asterisk — he won Emmy, Grammy and Tony Awards (including the Tony for Lifetime Achievement in 2017) and earned an honorary Oscar in 2011.

Born on Jan. 17, 1931, in Arkabutla, Mississippi, Jones’ deep and booming bass brought life to several animated film characters, such as Mufasa in 1994’s Disney-animated smash hit “The Lion King,” Voice Box at Hardware Store in 2005’s “Robots” and the Giant in the 2009 movie retelling of the “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy tale.

He also starred in the 1993 film “The Sandlot” as Mr. Mertle, a former baseball player who was the owner of the famed Hercules and Goliath, and as Pendleton in the 2018 drama “Warning Shot.” He played Terence Mann in 1989’s “Field of Dreams” and King Jaffe Joffer in the 1988 hit “Coming to America.”

In 2022, Manhattan’s Cort Theatre on West 48th Street was named the James Earl Jones Theatre to celebrate his contributions to the stage. It was the same place where he performed “Sunrise at Campobello” in 1958, just a year into his Broadway career.

Jones’ long Hollywood career defied expectations.

His father, Robert Earl Jones, deserted his wife before Jones was born.

And when Jones was just 6, his mother abandoned her son, leaving him with her parents — who adopted the boy and raised him on a farm up north in Michigan.

“A world ended for me, the safe world of childhood,” Jones wrote in his autobiography, “Voices and Silences.” “The move from Mississippi to Michigan was supposed to be a glorious event. For me it was a heartbreak, and not long after, I began to stutter.”

He was virtually mute for nearly eight years, using handwritten notes to communicate with teachers and other students.

But when he was 14, his high school English teacher, Donald Crouch, pressed Jones to read one of his poems aloud in class and Jones rediscovered his voice.

“He got me engaged in the debating class, the dramatic reading class and so on,” Jones told the Daily Mail in a 2010 interview. “He got me talking, and reading poetry — Edgar Allan Poe was my favorite.”

After high school, Jones went to the University of Michigan, initially to study medicine, but found himself falling in love with acting, switching his major to drama.

He completed service as an Army Ranger before moving to New York to pursue acting. He lived in an apartment that cost $19 per month and did other chores, like scrubbing floors, to make money, according to the Academy of Achievement.

In 1961, Jones performed in the American premiere of “The Blacks,” a play written by Jean Genet that explored race, inspired by Ghana’s 1957 independence.

The beloved performer won a Tony for Best Actor in a Play in 1969 for his role as Jack Jefferson in Howard Sackler’s “The Great White Hope,” a devastating story about the first black heavyweight boxing champion. Jones was also nominated for an Academy Award for the 1970 film adaptation.

In 1987, he won another Tony for playing Troy Maxson in “Fences” by August Wilson. He portrayed a former baseball star who worked as a garbageman in 1957 Pittsburgh.

He won two Primetime Emmys in 1991: for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his role in “Gabriel’s Fire,” and another for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Special for his part in “Heat Wave.” He won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for his work on “The Christmas Miracle Of Jonathan Toomey” in 2001.

But it is the role of Darth Vader that has perhaps brought him the most notoriety. He voiced the part for decades, since the beloved series’ first film in 1977. Since the very beginning, he has been the signature voice behind the masked character.

However, he said that at first, he didn’t believe what the script was telling him.

“When I first saw the dialogue that said, ‘Luke, I am your father,’ I said to myself, ‘He’s lying. I wonder how they are going to play that lie out?’” Jones said during an appearance in a 2004 documentary about the original “Star Wars” movies called “Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy.”

In 2022, at the age of 91, Jones made the decision to retire from the role, according to Vanity Fair.

However, his voice will carry on, as Jones signed off on allowing an artificial intelligence program to re-create his voice for future use, the outlet reported. His voice was used on the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” miniseries in 2022.

Jones was nominated for one Oscar, a Best Actor award for 1970’s “The Great White Hope.” He didn’t win, but he received the Academy Honorary Award in 2011.

He accepted the honor via video feed from London, where he was performing in the play “Driving Miss Daisy.” He said he didn’t want to interrupt his run in the show.

“I just want to ask you a question — if an actor’s nightmare is being onstage buck naked and not knowing his lines, what the heck do you call this?” he joked during the acceptance speech.

“I’m more than flabbergasted, there’s a word I’ve learned here in Britain, they’d say ‘I’m gobsmacked,'” he continued. “That’s the only word I can think of that’s appropriate for this improbable moment in my life.”

During the speech, Jones described his experience watching movies for the first time while growing up in Mississippi. He recalled sitting on a bench in the dark at age 4, as two shopkeepers stretched a bed sheet between their stores to screen the movie. He desperately wanted the showing to end.

The actor reminisced, “I dive under the bench in terror, begging, screaming, ‘make them stop, somebody make them stop doing that.’ Well, I can’t make ’em stop so eventually, I joined them.”

He also voices CNN’s signature promo, “This is CNN,” that plays at commercial breaks.

“I gained my voice, I found my voice,” he said during an interview with the Shubert Organization in 2022, as he toured the theater named after him, remembering the moment when he delivered his first Broadway line on that very stage.

The moment didn’t go exactly as planned, he explained — he had stuttered on his one and only line during the first performance, and he spent every night for one year practicing the sentence.

Jones was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in the 1990s, but didn’t speak about the condition publicly until 2016, when he appeared on an episode of Rachael Ray’s show.

Jones married actress Julienne Marie in 1968 before divorcing in 1972. He married his late wife, Cecilia Hart, 10 years later, in 1982. Hart passed away in 2016 following a yearlong battle with ovarian cancer.

The two share a son, Flynn, who is 42.