Legendary 'voice of Vader' James Earl Jones dies at 93

James Earl Jones, the American actor known for voicing Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise and Mufasa in The Lion King, has died at the age of 93, it was announced yesterday.

- TOM MURRAY

His cause of death was not immediately revealed.

Jones was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in the mid-1990s, a fact he made public in 2016.

Across a storied career on stage and screen, Jones received three Tony Awards, two Emmys and a Grammy.

He was born in the village of Arkabutla, Mississippi, on 17 January 1931, to parents of mixed African-American, Irish and Native American ancestry. His mother was a teacher and a maid while his father was a boxer and an actor, appearing in films such as The Sting (1973) and Trading Places (1983).

From the age of five, Jones was raised by his maternal grandparents on their farm in Dublin, Michigan. He found the move so traumatic that he developed a severe stutter and was nearly mute for eight years. “In Sunday school, I’d try to read my lessons and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter… By the time I got to school, my stuttering was so bad that I gave up trying to speak properly,” Jones recalled in an interview with the Daily Mail.

He credited his high school English teacher with ending his silence after he was encouraged to read poetry in front of the class. “I don’t say I was ‘cured,’” he told NPR in 2014. “I just work with it.”

He went on to attend the University of Michigan, dropping out of a pre-medical course in favour of acting, and encountered racism in college. “There weren’t many Black fellows at the University of Michigan,” Jones said during a 2005 talk at the Oxonian Society. “In response to a paper I wrote, a professor called me in. I had spelled simplicity ‘simplisity’. ‘Why are you trying to be someone you’re not?’ he said. ‘You’re a dumb son of a bitch who doesn’t belong at a university!’ I had no idea how to respond to such deep-seated racism.”