Two weeks after the passing of James Earl Jones at the age of 93, Broadway have announced that the theater lights will be dimmed in his honour on Thursday 26th at 6.45pm Eastern, an act that has become a tradition to mark the passing of notable members of the acting community who have left behind important work.
Though he may have been best known as the voice of “Star Wars” villain Darth Vader and Mufasa in “The Lion King,” Jones had a prolific career on Broadway that spanned almost seven decades. He’s been recognized by the theater community in the form of a 2017 special Tony Award for lifetime achievement. And the Cort Theatre, where he made his debut in 1958, was renamed the James Earl Jones Theatre in 2022.
Jones began his Broadway career in 1957 as an understudy in “The Egghead.” A decade later, he won a Tony for “The Great White Hope.” Jones went on to star in classics like August Wilson’s “Fences,” “The Iceman Cometh,” “Of Mice and Men,” “Othello,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Driving Miss Daisy.” He performed on Broadway most recently in 2016’s “The Gin Game” with Cicely Tyson, who died in 2021 at age 96. Jones was only one a handful of actors to receive an EGOT, winning an Oscar for “The Great White Hope,” Emmys for “Heat Wave” and “Gabriel’s Fire” and a spoken word Grammy for “Great American Documents.”
He’ll always be a legend to us here in the Star Wars galaxy.
