James Earl Jones dies at 93: How he left a legacy in Dutchess County
James Earl Jones will be remembered around the world for portraying Terence "Terry" Mann in "Field of Dreams," U.S. President Arthur Hockstader on Broadway in "Gore Vidal's The Best Man" and for giving "Star Wars" villain Darth Vader his sinister personality by providing his voice.
But in Dutchess County, the late Pawling resident will be remembered as a global celebrity who donated his time to community organizations, appeared in dramatic readings that raised money for a local schools and swore in the sheriff, his friend of more than three decades.
Jones died Monday at age 93. But his legacy lives on, at Poughkeepsie Day School, where the theater is named after him; at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie, where he worked with aspiring writers during the Young Playwrights Festival; and in the Village of Pawling, the Dutchess County community Jones called home since 1970.
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Originally from Arkabutla, Miss., Jones grew up in Michigan. In 1953, he began a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, after which he took a trip to New York City with his father, Robert Earl Jones, an actor who appeared in "The Sting" with Robert Redford and Paul Newman.
Father and son made a pilgrimage to New York City, and over successive nights attended an opera, "Tosca;" the ballet "Swan Lake;" and two plays, the musical "Pal Joey" and "The Crucible."
"'Pal Joey,' of all things, that's where I got hooked," Jones told the Journal in Aug. 2012. "Not that I could sing or do dancing or wanted to - but the warmth of the light on that stage. I just thought, 'That's a great place to be, for those performers.' I appreciated the atmosphere. I just thought, 'That's a lovely place to be.'"
Jones became an actor because of his father — and as a means to overcome stuttering.
“My stuttering,” Jones told the Journal in 2012, “has to do with confronting people. I've not yet explained this fully to anybody, but I had some incident in my life that made it very clear to me that there are certain things that break down in my ability to communicate in certain pressure situations."
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A career spanning six decades
By 1964, Jones was appearing in the iconic Cold War drama “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” with Peter Sellers. Five years later, Jones won a Tony for his role in “The Great White Hope” on Broadway. In 1970, Jones appeared on the silver screen in “The Great White Hope,” a role that earned him an Academy Award nomination.
His career took off and endured over six decades, winning him Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards. In 2017 he received the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre.
Jones appeared in “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” with some pretty well-known names, John Stamos, Cybill Shepherd, John Laroquette and Kristin Davis among them. But some of the loudest cheers, warmest applause, and heartiest laughs from the audience were given up for Jones.
“Gore Vidal does it pretty well,” Jones told the Journal in 2012. “His plays are quite poetic.”
But Vidal’s use of alliteration in the script for “The Best Man” left Jones struggling.
“Poets like to use alliteration and Gore had one phrase where I was putting pressure on the leading man and I called him ‘the lily-livered husband,’” said Jones, who met Vidal when he came to a rehearsal. “Well, besides being a nasty thing to say to somebody, especially a man, I would stutter. You get a stutterer into alliteration, vowels or consonants, and you’ve got trouble. I just begged the producer if I could just not say that and they allowed me to cut it. That was part of Gore’s poetic sweep in this play and you’ll find a lot of it. He uses good language, good, good American English. He uses intelligent language. He uses complex sentences. They’re often hard to memorize.”
For all that he accomplished on stage in this play, a revelation Jones had on July 31, 2012, the day Vidal died, hints at a special relationship that Jones may have shared with the former Dutchess County resident, without either man ever becoming aware that it existed.
“I had gone to the stage manager and I said, ‘Can we contact him?’” Jones recalled. “I wanted to find out if he was influenced by Dylan Thomas. My character is wrestling with the issue of dying, because he’s dying himself. He goes into some phrases that are hard to understand without a context. I said, ‘Is it possible that he had in mind, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’? I just thought, ‘What can I use to help support the words he gave me?’” he said. “They’re sort of sporadic words. Just as I was asking the stage manager the question … the stage manager said, ‘No, I don’t think you can communicate with him. He’s in very bad shape.’ That was about the time he was dying.”
Why James Earl Jones took Darth Vader role
Jones in 1977 reached a new generation of fans when he provided the voice for Darth Vader, the villain in “Star Wars,” which was initially described to Jones, by his agent, as "an odd little movie. It's like cowboys and Indians set in the galaxy."
Speaking to the Journal in 2012, Jones recalled that his agent told him, “'It doesn't pay much, but it's more than you've got.” The primary reason Jones took the job was due to a circumstance that most anyone can relate to, whether or not they have appeared on Broadway or in a major motion picture.
“I was broke,” Jones said. “I was taking anything I could get...I went and did it and met (director George) Lucas, and he directed me and I went home. It took a couple hours. He is very efficient. Neither of us knew what it all would amount to."
Jones was not credited for either "Star Wars" or its sequel, “The Empire Strikes Back.”
"I just considered myself a special effect," he said. "George didn't insist on that, but he accepted my wish."
Reflecting on all that “Star Wars” became, and the massive imprint it left on American popular culture, Jones told the Journal, "I'm very proud that I'm a part of that whole cult."
James Earl Jones' stage role ties to Poughkeepsie
But of all the roles he has played as a professional actor, the one Jones holds dearest is Lennie from "Of Mice and Men," in which he appeared on Broadway — this, Jones said, relates back to his stutter — "roles that are of inarticulate men, because I consider myself one of them."
But the role Jones assumed as a decades-long Dutchess County resident seems to have given him as much satisfaction as anything that brought him beneath the stage lights or thurst him onto movie screens.
Jones maintained a particularly close relationship with Poughkeepsie Day School, which his son, Flynn, attended from 1994-2001.
During Flynn’s first year as a student, Jones did a reading during a Poughkeepsie Day School fundraiser at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie. In 1998, Jones again appeared on the Bardavon stage during a benefit for the school, this time with actress Mary Tyler Moore, at the time a Town of Washington resident, for a benefit reading of A. R. Gurney's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Love Letters."
Jones and his wife, Cecilia, were big supporters of the school, and pulled together ensembles of actors for multiple performances on the school's campus, according to Sandra Moore, former admissions director at Poughkeepsie Day School.
These performances included scenes from "Of Mice and Men" in 1999, which featured Jones and his fellow Dutchess resident David Strathairn; and "Driving Miss Daisy" with Jane Alexander in 2000. In 2001, Jones appeared in a benefit production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" with Alexander and the late Natasha Richardson, who lived in Dutchess.
In January 2000, the school's auditorium underwent a refurbishment and was named the James Earl Jones Theater in his honor.
"James Earl and Ceci Jones are beloved members of the Poughkeepsie Day School family," Moore told the Journal in 2012. "From the moment they stepped on campus as 'new' parents, they have been warm and caring contributors to the school community. Everything they've done - in the classroom, on stage and behind the scenes - reflects their gracious, generous spirit. All of us at PDS are truly grateful to them."
Jones and Bill Davis from the Town of Poughkeepsie both volunteered their time to help the organization Christmas in April, now called Rebuilding Together Dutchess County, refurbish homes in Pawling. And Davis was president of the board of the Catharine Street Community Center in Poughkeepsie in 1996, when Jones read Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech at the organization's annual breakfast held in honor of the slain civil rights leader.
"His name alone drew a lot of people," Davis told the Journal in 2012. "We were very, very pleased that he opted to come, because he is a community-minded person."
Jones also participated three times in the Bardavon 1869 Opera House’s Young Playwrights Festival. He allowed the prospective playwrights to direct him and he shared his perspective on numerous topics, including voice-overs and scripts.
"He was always very giving, with his knowledge and with his time and, obviously, with his ability," Bardavon Executive Director Chris Silva said. "It was just thrilling for the kids."
Jones in 2012 expressed surprise, framed by humility, when told by the Journal that he was held in high regard for his community involvement.
"A lot of people who are well-known probably go up there just for the privacy," Jones said of Dutchess. "I don't think I can do that. My wife's got to go shopping there. She enjoys going shopping there." He added, "She enjoys having an account at McKinney & Doyle's," referring to McKinney & Doyle's Fine Foods Cafe in Pawling.
Jones seemed especially proud to call Dutchess his home when he spoke about his son and the education he received at Poughkeepsie Day School, where he was enrolled after the family tried schools in Los Angeles and New York City.
"We wanted a community,” Jones said of his son, “he could thrive in.”
This article originally appeared on Poughkeepsie Journal: James Earl Jones dies at 93: Inside his Dutchess County legacy
