As a screen and stage performer, Jones was in an exclusive class: He was an EGOT winner, one of the few people to have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. But as a vocal performer, Jones was in a class of his own. Many other actors have made lasting marks in American film, but no other voices have become part of American culture, in our greatest movies, on our TV shows, and even in our broadcast news, as has the voice of James Earl Jones. Gifted with regal, deep bass tones, his voice was so commandeering and sounded so authoritative that when CNN attempted to brand itself as “the most trusted name in news,” it hired Jones to recite that slogan for them on air. Some of Jones’s voiceover performances, such as his role as Mufasa in The Lion King and especially as Darth Vader in Star Wars, have transcended cinema and have become part of modern mythology.

James Earl Jones was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, on Jan. 17, 1931, and was raised mostly by his grandparents on a farm in Michigan. Like the biblical Moses, who had a speech impediment before becoming the messenger of God, Jones grew up with a stuttering problem before becoming the voice of God (descriptively speaking). Jones later claimed the stutter was induced by the trauma of having been forced to leave Mississippi for Michigan when he was only 5 years old. He wasn’t cured of it until high school, when a teacher asked him to read a poem out loud in class. Jones, surprised at how good he felt as he was doing it, realized that speaking was no longer an activity that he needed to shy away from — demonstrating that we should always keep believing in ourselves because even our weaknesses might one day become our greatest strengths.

Jones stayed close to home for college, attending the University of Michigan, where he became interested in acting and majored in drama. He began appearing in plays in 1957, a prelude to his distinguished theatrical career, and then in the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1960, achieving praise for his interpretation of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and for his role as Othello in 1964. That same year, while Jones was playing the role of the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice alongside George C. Scott, Stanley Kubrick, who had come to see Scott play Shylock, was so taken with Jones that he asked him to appear alongside Scott in Dr. Strangelove, the movie that would mark Jones’s big-screen debut.

Even after appearing in a movie directed by one of America’s leading filmmakers, for most of the remainder of the decade, Jones still found more success in theater and even in TV than in film. His Oscar-nominated performance as heavyweight champion boxer Jack Jefferson in the 1970 movie The Great White Hope, a role for which he had won his first Tony Award the prior year, would change that, making him a critically acclaimed screen performer as well as stage actor.

His true entry into popular culture, of course, came in 1977, when Star Wars director George Lucas cast him as the voice of Darth Vader — a role for which he was originally uncredited and for which he was paid only $7,000.

Jones’s acting career was as prolific as that of any actor of his generation. The child who was once so embarrassed by his stutter that he went long stretches during his adolescence without even speaking went on to accumulate over 130 combined film and TV credits. In 1991, he became the first actor to win two Emmys in the same year. The following year, President George H.W. Bush awarded him the National Medal of the Arts. 

His most memorable non-voiceover-only film role may have been his performance as the reclusive, initially prickly, and ultimately warmhearted writer Terence Mann in Field of Dreams. The conclusion of Jones’s stirring monologue in the beloved movie about the significance of baseball in America in many ways characterizes Jones himself: “This field, this game” — and this man — is “a part of our past,” as well as our present and very likely also our future. Like our national pastime, Jones “reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”

Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America.