In a culture inclined to fill itself with screen-over-stage drama, especially if the screen offerings are furnished by the House of Mouse, one wants to trumpet that James Earl Jones, who died Monday, aged ninety-three, was an actor who -greater than the range of his voice, which was immediately placed. The fix feels especially urgent, as the Joneses are being dumped by eighties and nineties kids whose sticky-fingered nostalgia already dominates so much of our collective memory. Their first, formative encounter with Jones’ craft likely came through acoustics, in his vocal performances as Darth Vader (reborn in 2022, in AI form, in the Disney+ miniseries Obi-Wan Kenobi) and Mufasa (and in both 1994 and several subsequent iterations of Disney’s The Lion King). These roles are celebrated along with other embodied film portraits of Jones, which nevertheless stand out for their sonority and demeanor: the hypnotism of Terence Mann in “Field of Dreams”, the comic lack of humor of King Jaffe Joffer of “Coming to America” ( first screened more than three decades ago and then laid to rest in a recent sequel).
The worry is that our memory will diminish Jones’s vast career – spanning sixty years and including more than two hundred turns in theatre, film and television – until, as with Plutarch’s refined nightingale, voice and nothing else: voice and nothing more. In a study of this name, the philosopher Mladen Dolar admits that “the voice seems to be the most familiar thing.” At the same time, to experience any voice is to witness the strange physicality of that which emanates beyond the body, “but still remains corporeal,” unattributable to either words or flesh. It’s a paradox best honed by those, like Jones, who think their true residence is the theater, where bodies must project in every way. And what a voice! What a facility with his instrument! Jones was unfazed by its vital role in his work. No mere accident of the larynx, the voice, as he understood it, was tantamount to presence, the well-trained conduit to the emotional reality of dramatic performance.
As is the prerogative of the actor, Jones begins the story of his life with an amazing memory. His 1993 memoir, James Earl Jones: Voices and Silences, written with Penelope Nivan, recalls the “warmth of light” filling his grandmother’s home after his birth on January 17, 1931, in Arcabutla, Mississippi. His people were Southern farmers, dark, contemplative, hardworking, colored. He was raised by his maternal grandparents after his parents, Ruth and Robert Earl Jones, unfit for each other and for raising children, were left to pursue other lives, a defection that Jones would relate in his diary to his experiences performing Oedipus Rex. The ultimate tragedy of the play is not Oedipus’s parricide, Jones argues, “but that when he was a helpless infant the father said, ‘Get rid of him,’ and the mother said, ‘All right.’ Both parents would come in and out of his life. Robert himself was on his way to becoming an accomplished actor, and when Jones was twenty-one, the father introduced his son, whom he had not seen since infancy, to a world that awaited him on the cultural scene of New York, especially in his theater .
The memoir’s symmetrical subtitle, Voices and Silences, announces a motif he pursued throughout his life and work. Jones grew up among the “gamut” of country life, including family members prone to gossip and talk – “I grew up with the spoken word,” he wrote. However, when the family moved north for a fresh start and better schools in Michigan, when Jones was five years old, he began to stutter and soon retreated into silence; he has described himself as “practically mute” since the age of six. This crisis in language became existential: “I was robbing myself of all presence. I denied my identity. Then, in high school, he found himself directed by an English teacher to the great guardians of Anglophone poetics and prose: Shakespeare, Longfellow, Poe, Emerson. After that, Jones “couldn’t get enough of talking, debating, oratory” and most of all “acting”. (Nor did it matter that, on the other side of puberty, he “could now speak in a deep, booming voice” that others “seemed to like.”) Jones likens his metamorphosis to that of Gwen Verdon, who was thrown into dance classes, while battling rickets as a child. “A weak muscle can become a dominant muscle, either out of an obsession with weakness or a sincere effort to correct it,” he notes, adding, “a weak muscle can define a life and a profession.”
Jones enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1949 to pursue a career in medicine and soon switched to studying drama, though at the time he considered it merely a pleasant stopover until his ROTC unit was called up. in Korea. He learned about the truce in the green room during the community theater’s summer season. Instead of being shipped out, he spent nearly two years in a cold-weather training unit in Colorado. Soon after, Jones moved to Greenwich Village to study at the American Theater Wing. There he met acting coach Nora Dunphy, a former student of the linguist modeled after Pygmalion’s Professor Higgins, whose speech exercises reinforced for Jones the link between diction and character. “Because of my silence, I approached language differently than most actors,” Jones explains. As his studies progressed, he “believed that what counts for a character is not his intellect, but the sounds he makes.” This interpretation distinguishes Jones from students of the de-rigueur method. Lee Strasberg would later tell Jones that he was among the rare actors who were better left “in their own way.”
His professional opportunities, even as they piled up, could barely keep up with his “ravenous” desire for roles. He rehearsed for a production of “Henry V” while starring in another play, Lionel Abel’s “The Pretender,” which was still running, then soon after attracted most of Deodatus Village along with Cicely Tyson and Louis Gossett Jr. in Off Broadway, an all-black production of “Blacks.” It was a racially contentious production from which Jones took periodic breaks to do small TV jobs and, naturally, more Shakespeare; he even turned down higher-paying work, such as the Oscar-nominated drama One Potato, Two Potatoes (in which he co-starred with his father), to work with Joe Papp, the founder of Shakespeare in the Park. In 1963, Papp offered Jones the role of Othello, a performance in which theater critic Tom Prideaux lifepraised as “unjustly overlooked” in favor of Othello’s more spectacular turn across the lake, by Sir Laurence Olivier.
After Othello came another “elemental man,” as Jones calls them, in “The Great White Hope.” The main character is based on real-life boxer Jack Johnson, a heavyweight champion who triumphantly flouts the color line, in bed and in the ring. Howard Sackler’s play debuted on Broadway in 1968 and explores the disharmony of a man who needs words to subvert the racial symbolism of his body. The story’s conflict is incredibly connected to Jones’ love story and the uneasy philosophy of race. He viewed black men as America’s model tragic heroes, a la Hamlet or Willy Loman, and yet he was allergic to the ways in which racial pride would compel others to speak for him. Jones may have stepped “into the shoes of Othello” and earned a reputation for striking color—”I’ll admit I had a way of falling in love with my Desdemona,” he admits in his memoirs—but he wasn’t of the people who surrendered to each representational image. Jones recalled a discussion with “Jimmy” Baldwin, who asked, “What do you see when you wake up in the morning? Do you see a black person or do you see a person?” Jones replied, “I see i.”
“The Great White Hope” presented its own special opportunity for Jones to deliver a performance whose brawn exceeded his physical form. Author and activist Tony Cade Bambara wrote at the time that Jones “steers us away from some of the looser features of the text” and added, “There is always some telepathic, unnameable, superhuman thing or other that is dark, defiant, sly, tender, primal—it has an atmosphere as well as a person who strikes us.” 1970, feeling that it “eliminated any poetic aspect that the stage play had evoked, reducing mythic characters ‘to mere social units.’ Was it the fault of the director or the script or the limitations of the adaptation itself? “The lesson May it is simply almost impossible to transform one form into another – novel into film, stage drama into film. Maybe!”
Maybe! But actors are the worst critics and, fortunately, we don’t always have to take their word for it. Generations separated by space and time from the theatrical version of The Great White Hope will never know what they’re missing when they play the movie, if they can find it. Whatever absence is made up for by presence – Jones as Jack, completely comfortable in his skin, his voice complementing a flimsy frame that’s often shut out by frequent close-ups anyway. Here his mouth is mythical. At the beginning of the film, before a follow-up match, a crowd of fans, young and old, gather around Jack, praying for victory “for us.” There is no money on the line, but a more amorphous stake – the fate of the race. “God, God,” Jack replies. His baritone sounds meant for the pulpit, but his pride lecture comes as a surprise: “Country boy, if you ain’t there already, all the boxing and all the nigger prayers in the world ain’t gonna get you there. ” His timbre is as treacherous as his taste for the fleshy press of white and caramel leather. There will be no Negro spirituals on this day. ♦
