Legendary 'Coming to America' Star Dies At 93

supporting roles in hit movies including “The Sting.”

Jones’ family moved from Mississippi to Michigan when he was 5, a traumatic upheaval that caused him to develop a stutter. His fear of speaking rendered him almost mute until he got to high school, where a poetry teacher helped him overcome his disability by encouraging him to read his poems aloud.

“He began to challenge me, to nudge me toward speaking again … toward acknowledging and appreciating the beauty of words,” Jones said.

Jones studied drama at the University of Michigan, served as an Army Ranger and then moved to New York, where he soon landed lead roles in Shakespearean stage productions. He made his film debut in 1964 as a bombardier in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.”

In 1967 Jones was cast as troubled boxer Jack Johnson in a theatrical production of “The Great White Hope,” a career-changing role that won him a Tony. He reprised the role three years later in the film adaptation, becoming only the second African American man, after Sidney Poitier, to be nominated for an Academy Award.

By the mid-1970s Jones was working steadily in movies and TV – a prolific run that never slowed. Over the next five decades he appeared in many memorable roles: As Alex Haley in TV’s “Roots:The Next Generations,” warlord Thulsa Doom in “Conan the Barbarian,” an African king in “Coming to America,” Kevin Costner’s reluctant recruit in “Field of Dreams,” Admiral Greer in “The Hunt for Red October” and “Patriot Games” and a South African preacher in “Cry, the Beloved Country.”

The power of speech

In 2019 he again voiced Mufasa in Disney’s remake of “The Lion King,” becoming the only cast member to reprise his role from the first film.

Over the years he also guest-starred in dozens of TV series, from “L.A. Law” to “Sesame Street,” appeared regularly on the stage and lent his deep, rumbling voice to everything from “The Simpsons” to a popular audio recording of the King James version of the Bible.

Jones said people in public sometimes didn’t recognize him until they heard his voice.

“When you don’t talk it’s like going ninja,” he told Rachael Ray in 2016. “You get in the taxi and say where you’re going and the guy turns around and says, ‘Hey, aren’t you that Darth Vader guy?’”

Over his long and prolific career Jones won three Tonys, two Emmys, a Grammy, a Golden Globe and numerous other awards.

“It wasn’t acting. It was language. It was speech,” he said when asked what aroused his passion for acting. “It was the thing that I’d … denied myself all those years (as a boy). I now had a great — an abnormal — appreciation for it.

“And it was the idea that you can do a play — like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever — and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life,” he told the Academy of Achievement in 1996.

“You could say these things! That’s what it’s still about, whether it’s the movies or TV or what. That what it’s still about.”

This story is developing and will be updated.

---