James Earl Jones is known around the world by people of all ages and walks of life, from Star Wars fans who know him as the voice of Darth Vader to children who know him as Mufasa from Disney’s The Lion King. He is renowned for an illustrious career in theater, film, and television. The Drama League will honor the legendary Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award winner at its 31st Annual Musical Celebration of Broadway to be held February 2015.
The black-tie gala will feature dozens of stars from Hollywood and Broadway in a one-night-only musical tribute. The Musical Celebration of Broadway Honoring James Earl Jones is inspired by Jones’s career in theater, film, and television, including You Can’t Take it With You, Fences, Master Harold…and the Boys, The Great White Hope, Othello, Driving Miss Daisy, Field Of Dreams, Gabriel’s Fire, The Lion King, and the Star Wars trilogy, among others.
“As he is proving eight times a week at the Longacre Theatre in You Can’t Take It With You (in which he currently stars) James Earl Jones is a national treasure,†said Executive Director Gabriel Shanks in a statement. “The Drama League is honored to celebrate his extraordinary life and career with him on Feb. 2, and to bring together his many co-stars, friends, admirers, and collaborators from the last six decades, all in one very spectacular night.â€
Jones joins a noted roster of past Drama League Honorees, including Neal Patrick Harris, Liza Minnelli, and Chita Rivera. The Musical Celebration of Broadway Honoring James Earl Jones will raise funds to support the educational training programs of The Drama League Directors Project. Alumni of the award-winning initiative which was started in 1982 now number more than 300.
The late great Broadway producer Joseph Papp gave Jones one of his first major breakthroughs by casting him in Shakespeare’s Henry V
. It began Jones’s long affiliation with the New York Shakespeare Festival, eventually counting the title roles of Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear among his many distinguished performances for the company.In the 1960s, Jones was one of the first African American actors to appear regularly in daytime soap operas (playing a doctor in both The Guiding Light and As the World Turns); he made his film debut in 1964 in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
In 1969, Jones won a Tony Award for his breakthrough role as boxer Jack Johnson in the Broadway hit, The Great White Hope (which also garnered him an Oscar nomination for the 1970 film adaptation). He won a second Tony Award in 1987 for August Wilson’s Fences, in which he played a former baseball player who finds it difficult to communicate with his son.
Although he was cast in numerous leading roles in films in the 1970s, including The Man (1972), Claudine (1974), The River Niger (1975), and The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976), Jones continued to make his biggest impressions on stage in the critically acclaimed Master Harold…and the Boys, among others.
His film performances of the 1980s included his work as the oppressed coal miner in John Sayles’s Matewan (1987) and as the embittered writer in Field of Dreams (1989), while the ’90s found him in the thick of the Tom Clancy blockbuster trilogy–The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, and Clear and Present Danger–as well as in the film version of the Alan Paton classic Cry, the Beloved Country (1995).
His career also includes a wide range of television work. He played Alex Haley in Roots: The Next Generation (1979), Junius Johnson (an Emmy-winning performance) in Heat Wave
, the 1990 TNT drama about the 1965 riots in Watts, and a great number of guest roles in series ranging from The Defenders and Dr. Kildare to more recently, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, and House.In 2005, Jones starred on Broadway in a critically acclaimed revival of On Golden Pond for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. In 2006, he starred as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the production of Thurgood, and in 2008 portrayed “Big Daddy†in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway with Phylicia Rashad.
In 2011, Jones starred in the Broadway and London productions of Driving Miss Daisy with Vanessa Redgrave, and in 2012 he starred in the Broadway revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man.
For more information on his life and career, read Jones’s autobiography, Voices and Silences.