JONES, JAMES EARL

born Jan. 17, 1931, Arkabutla, Miss., U.S. Jones, 1990 American actor best known for his leading roles in Shakespeare's Othello and in The Great White Hope, a play about the tragic career of the first black heavyweight-boxing champion, loosely based on the life of Jack Johnson. Jones's father, the actor Robert Earl Jones, left his family before Jones was born, and the youth was raised largely by his grandparents in Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan (B.A., 1953), majoring in drama, and, after a brief stint in the U.S. Army, went to New York City, studying at the American Theatre Wing and with Lee Strasberg. He played in his first off-Broadway production in 1957 and subsequently, with the New York Shakespeare Festival, played a number of Shakespearean roles from 1961 to 1973. He also performed in other New York productions and won a Tony award for his boxer role in Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope (1968), later starring in the film version (1970). Through the 1970s and '80s he received critical acclaim for a number of stage, film, and television roles, notably in the two-character stage play Paul Robeson (1978) and in the title role of Othello, opposite Christopher Plummer's Iago (198182).