James Earl Jones Was Never Just One Thing
5 min read
James Earl Jones would say, across the many years that he was asked about his role in Star Wars, that he recorded his original performance as Darth Vader in only a couple of hours. The voice is so ingrained in our culture that imagining how little time the actual work took is almost comical. But a couple of hours was all that was needed. The point, Jones would say, was to limit himself to a specific margin of expression. Too much, and Darth Vader would be overly humanized. Too little, and audiences would forget that the man really was human, once—and miss the tragedy of the arc George Lucas would take decades to flesh out, the path that brought Vader from a frightened, vulnerable boy to an indomitable intergalactic terror. Because of Jones, everything was there from the start.
Even as a child seeing the movie for the first time, I knew to be taken aback by the mismatch between the thundering voice and the meek and (notably) white man that Darth Vader was eventually revealed to be, once the helmet came off. Jones’s voice suited the man in the mask: lacquered, expressionless, disembodied, imperturbable. It matched Darth Vader’s vision of power—not the small human contained within, but the grandiose projection that this small human needed us to believe he was. It matched Jones himself: a towering figure, with a voice built to echo through the opera halls of our minds, but also very much a flawed, fiery, mischievous human with a varied and broad career, even if the popular imagination did not always appear to know it.
Jones’s death yesterday, at the age of 93, caps a career that seemingly knew no bounds—more than 100 screen credits alone, a remarkable fact for any actor, but a particularly rare fact for a Black actor whose career got started onstage in the 1950s and on-screen in the ’60s, with a slight but memorable turn in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. By the time he landed his full-fledged breakthrough role in Hollywood, playing a Jack Johnson–inspired boxer in The Great White Hope (1970), Jones was already a Tony winner, for playing that same role on Broadway.
Yet for many of us, Jones was, first and foremost, a voice. This was no small feat for a man who often recounted having gone mute as a child, after his grandparents uprooted him from Mississippi to Michigan; he began speaking again only when a high-school teacher encouraged him to read some of his own poetry in front of the class. He had a bad stutter, yet became arguably the most recognizable voice in the world. His was the resonating bass that many people heard when they called 411; the voice introducing CNN and advertising Verizon and Sprint (“Totes Mcgotes!”); the voice persuading you to consult the Yellow Pages.
It can be hard to remember that he was more than a voice. Last night, I revisited the 1974 film Claudine, which stands out, among Jones’s screen roles, for its reminder that he was not simply a noble patriarch, a la The Sandlot and Field of Dreams, or trusted authority figure, as in his short stint as a detective on TV’s Paris. For a time, Jones seemed to flirt with becoming a sex symbol, playing a role that feels extraordinary now given his image. In Claudine, he starred as Rupert “Roop” Marshall, a sexy garbage man whom Diahann Carroll,in the titular role as a working mother with six kids barely getting by, can’t help but fall for. This is somewhat to her detriment, but also very much to her pleasure, which the film noticeably lingers on: long scenes of Claudine and Roop in bed, smoking after sex, talking during sex, so much of their lives playing out in the tight confines of his Harlem bedroom, an escape from the even tighter digs of Claudine’s crowded, noisy apartment. Jones seduces us just as he seduces her, with that glint of mischief in his eye, that hop-and-skip excitement coursing through his body, a sexual rowdiness and candor that—to make a claim that is made too often nowadays but is actually true in this case—is rarely seen in romantic comedies today.
What makes Claudine worth watching 50 years later is the way Jones’s seductiveness is given room to fester. Our stance on his character is allowed to change, as Claudine’s troubles with welfare and Roop’s anxieties about Black fatherhood and his worth as a breadwinner—reality, in other words—overwhelm their romance. It’s no exaggeration to say that later in Jones’s career he would solidify into something of a national father figure, a presence we could all, across a significant range of perspectives and differences, lean on and share. Claudine, with its tortured prescience, seems to see this coming; I’m not your father, his performance says.
Jones was sometimes classed alongside the Sidney Poitiers and Harry Belafontes of Black Hollywood, by brunt of being a “crossover” star in the ’60s and ’70s. He was notable for being able to appeal to both Black and white audiences, not only commercially, but also as measured by the industry’s markers of success: Tonys and Emmys (Jones had multiple of each), career endurance, and the like. What’s just as true is that we have demanded that our mainstream minority stars, particularly of Jones’s era, possess a sense of duty that we expect from almost no one else. Performers can never easily straddle the truth of their own identity and the needs of the broader culture. Over the years, Poitier was criticized precisely because of the appeal he held for white American audiences, whether he deliberately courted that appeal or not.
Jones, whose career peaked a little later and at a less despairing moment in history than Poitier’s, fared somewhat better. Watching him in Claudine, or revisiting his Tony-winning turn onstage in Fences, audiences couldn’t miss who he was or what he used his body—those long limbs and bright expressions, his barrel chest—to mean. He was a titan given the career that he deserved—a career bigger and broader than most actors’. And it is to his credit that even this was not big enough.
