Jones said he never made much money off the Darth Vader part - only $9,000 for the first film - and that he considered it merely a special effects job. He did not even ask to be in the credits of the first two "Star Wars" movies.
His long list of awards included Tonys for "The Great White Hope" in 1969 and "Fences" in 1987 on Broadway and Emmys in 1991 for "Gabriel's Fire" and "Heat Wave" on television. He also won a Grammy for best spoken word album, "Great American Documents" in 1977.
Although he never won a competitive Academy award, he was nominated for best actor for the film version of "The Great White Hope" and was given an honorary Oscar in 2011.
He began his movie career playing Lieutenant Luther Zogg in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 classic "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."
Later acclaimed movie roles included novelist Terence Mann in 1989's "Field of Dreams" and South African Reverend Stephen Kumalo in 1995's "Cry, the Beloved Country." He also starred in "Conan the Barbarian," "Coming to America," "The Sandlot," "Matewan," "The Hunt for Red October" and "Field of Dreams," among others.
Jones also was heard in dozens of television commercials and for several years CNN used his authoritative "This is CNN" to introduce its newscasts.
ESTRANGED FROM FATHER
James Earl Jones was born on January 17, 1931, in the tiny community of Arkabutla, Mississippi, to a family with a mixed ethnic background of Irish, African and Cherokee.
His father, prizefighter-turned-actor Robert Earl Jones, left the family shortly afterward. James was raised by his maternal grandparents, who forbade him to see his father, and the two did not get together until James moved to New York in the 1950s. Eventually they appeared in several plays together.
Jones was about 5 years old when his grandparents moved the family from Mississippi to a farm in Michigan and it was around that time that he quit speaking because of his stutter.
He was mostly silent for a decade until a ploy by his high school English teacher got him to speak up. The teacher made Jones recite to the class a poem that he said he had written to prove he was familiar enough with it to be the author.
Although after that he said he still had to choose his words carefully, Jones learned to control his stutter and became interested in acting.
After studying drama at the University of Michigan, he moved to New York, where his theater performances increasingly attracted critical attention and acclaim.
His breakthrough role on Broadway was "The Great White Hope," playing a character based on Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. The play examined racism through the lens of the boxing world and critics raved about Jones' performance.
A popular theater draw for decades, his Shakespeare leading roles included Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Othello. He also had a notable portrayal of singer-actor-activist Paul Robeson on Broadway in 1977 and of author Alex Haley in the television mini-series "Roots: The Next Generation."
He was "capable of moving in seconds from boyish ingenuousness to near-biblical rage and somehow suggesting all the gradations in between," the Washington Post wrote in a 1987 review of "Fences."
Jones' first wife was Julienne Marie Hendricks, one of his "Othello" co-stars. Earl and his second wife, actress Cecilia Hart, who died in 2016, had one child, Flynn Earl Jones.