James Earl Jones, a dominant presence on screen who nevertheless gained greater fame off-camera as the sonorous voice of Star Wars villain Darth Vader and Mufasathe benevolent leader in The Lion Kingdied Monday. He was 93.

Jones, who rose to national prominence in 1970 with his powerful, Oscar-nominated performance as America’s first black heavyweight champion in The Great White Hopedied at his home in Dutchess County, New York, Independent Artist Group announced.

The leading star made his big screen debut in Stanley by Kubrick Doctor Strange love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and was notable in many other films, including Claudine (1974) opposite Diahann Carroll; Field of dreams (1989), as the reclusive author Terence Mann; and The sandbox (1993), as the intimidating neighbor boy Mr. Mertel.

For his work on stage, Jones received two Tony Awards for Best Actor: for originating the role of Jack Jefferson—based on real-life boxer Jack Johnson—in 1968’s Howard Sacklers Great White Hope and for playing the patriarch struggling to provide for his family in a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 production of August Wilson’s Fences.

Jones, the recipient of an honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards in 2011 and a special lifetime achievement Tony in 2017, was one of the few people to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony and the first actor to win two Emmy’s in one year.

“You can’t be an actor like me and not be in some of the worst movies like I have,” the self-deprecating star said upon receiving his Academy Award. “But I stand before you, deeply honored, deeply grateful and just plain astonished.”

Jones’ rise to become one of the most admired American actors of all time is remarkable considering he suffered from a debilitating stuttering disorder as a child.

Born Todd Jones on January 17, 1931, he grew up in ArkabutlaMississippi, and was raised by his maternal grandparents. At the age of 5, the family moved to a farm in Dublin, Michigan.

“That move was traumatic in some way,” he once recalled. “My ability to communicate went away. I couldn’t talk to people without breaking down and stuttering,” and he pretended to be mute.

When a high school English teacher encouraged Jones to read a poem he had written to the class, he found that his stutter disappeared when he said words he had memorized. He won a public speaking contest as a senior and earned a full scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he studied medicine and discovered acting.

He made his stage debut in a community theater production in Manistee, Michiganbefore leaving to serve in the Korean War.

After his discharge, Jones moved to New York to study theater and made his Broadway debut in 1958 in Sunrise at Kampobellothe Tony winner for best play written by Dory Shary and Ralph Bellamy played the role of polio-stricken President Franklin Roosevelt.

Jones said THR in 2011 that his career was guided by the words of his father, Robert Earl Jones – an actor who had been blacklisted from the industry by the House Un-American Activities Committee but in The Sting —told him when he first started.

“If you want to run this business, you have to must do it because you love it, not because it go make yourself rich or famous. That was the best advice he could give me,” he said.

Kubrick cast Jones as Lt. Lothar Zogga member of the crew of the B-52 bomber, in Doctor Strange love after seeing him in a Shakespeare in the Park production in New York.

“George C. Scott played Shylock when Kubrick came to see it,” he recalled in a January 2014 interview. “I was also in the play, as the Prince of Morocco, and Kubrick said, ‘I’ll take the black one too.’ That’s not what he actually said, but that’s how I like to say it.”

His performance with the future chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Jane Alexander, Great White Hope (she also earned a Tony) gave him the cover of Newsweek magazine in October 1968 (headline: “New Star on Broadway”), and for the film version he would become only the second black man (after Sidney Poitiers) to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

When director George Lucas was looking for a bass voice for Darth Vader during casting Star Wars (1977), he reportedly considered Orson Welles but felt his voice might be too recognizable. So he called Jones’ agent and asked if the actor wanted to work for a day.

Jones was paid a flat fee of $7,000 for the job and did not admit to being the voice of Darth Vader until the third film in the franchise.

Once, while traveling across the country, Jones played his Darth Vader voice on the CB radio scanner. “The truck drivers were freaking out — it was Darth Vader to them. I had to stop doing that,” he said. The New York Times magazine.

As for voicing his character in The Lion KingJones said in a 2011 interview that he still enjoys meeting kids who love the 1994 Disney classic.

Their parents will say, ‘There is Mufasa!’ But I don’t look like a lion, and if they’re real little kids, they think they’re being screwed or they’re being made fun of,” he said. “And I can’t show them, but I can tell (in Mufasa’s voice), ‘Simba. You have deliberately disobeyed me!’”

Jones, of course, was also known as the “voice” of CNN.

“I cleared my mind and then filled it with the thought of all the hundreds of stories — tragic, violent, funny, moving — that could follow my introduction,” he said when asked about his motivation. “And then I said, ‘This is CNN.'”

On screen, Jones was also memorable as “Few Clothes” Johnson in John Sayles’ Matewan (1987), as Reverend Stephen Kumalo in the apartheid drama Scream, the beloved country (1995) and as Robert Duvall’s embittered half-brother in A family thing (1996).

He played Admiral Greer in three films based on Tom Clancy novels: The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and present danger (1994) — and was king Jaffe Joffer in a few Coming soon to America films, including a 2020 sequel.

Jones’ two Emmy’s came in 1991 to play the role of a private investigator wrongly imprisoned in the short-lived ABC drama Gabriel’s Fire and as the owner of a shoe repair business in the TNT television film Heat waveabout the riots in Los Angeles Watts in 1965.

Among the numerous roles he played on stage were: Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice of the US Supreme Court; Big Daddy in Cat on a hot zinc roof; Chairman Arthur Hockstader in The best man; and driver Sweets Colburn in Riding with Miss Daisyopposite Angela Lansbury.

In 2022, the 110-year-old Cort Theatre on Broadway was renamed The James Earl Jones Theatre in his honor.

He married actress Julienne Marie in 1968, after meeting her during a production of Othellobut they divorced four years later. He met his second wife, actress Cecilia Hart, while filming the CBS police drama Parisin which he played a police captain and she a young officer. They married in 1982 and had a son, Flynn. Hart died in October 2016 of ovarian cancer at the age of 68.