James Earl Jones, a commanding presence onscreen who gained greater fame off-camera as the sonorous voice of Star Wars villain Darth Vader and Mufasa, the benevolent leader in The Lion King, died Monday. He was 93.

Jones, who burst into national prominence in 1970 with his powerful Oscar-nominated performance as America’s first Black heavyweight champion in The Great White Hope, died at his home in Dutchess County, New York, Independent Artist Group announced.

The star made his big-screen debut in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

He was noteworthy in many films, including Claudine (1974) opposite Diahann Carroll; Field of Dreams (1989), as reclusive author Terence Mann; and The Sandlot (1993), as  intimidating neighborhood guy Mr. Mertle.

Jones, the recipient of an honorary Oscar at the 2011 Governors Awards and a special Tony for lifetime achievement in 2017, was one of the handful of people to earn an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony and the first actor to win two Emmys in one year.

“You cannot be an actor like I am and not have been in some of the worst movies like I have,” the self-deprecating star said when he was given his Academy Award. “But I stand before you deeply honored, mighty grateful and just plain gobsmacked.”

Jones’ rise to being one of the most-admired American actors of all time was remarkable considering he suffered from debilitating stutter as a child.

At age 5, the family moved to a farm in Dublin, Michigan.

“That move was traumatic somehow,” he once recalled. “My ability to communicate dropped out. I couldn’t speak to people without breaking up and stuttering,” and he pretended to be mute.

He made his stage debut in a community theater production in Manistee, Michigan, before serving in the Korean War.

After being discharged, Jones moved to New York to pursue theater. He made his Broadway debut in 1958 in Sunrise at Campobello, the Tony winner for best play that was written by Dory Schary and starred Ralph Bellamy as polio-stricken President Franklin Roosevelt.

“If you want to do this business, you gotta do it because you love it, not because it’s gonna make you rich or famous. That was the best advice he could give me,” he said.

Kubrick cast Jones as Lt. Lothar Zogg, a member of the B-52 bomber crew, in Dr. Strangelove after spotting him in New York in a Shakespeare in the Park production.

“George C. Scott was playing Shylock when Kubrick came to look him over,” he recalled in 2014 interview. “I was also in the play, as the Prince of Morocco, and Kubrick said, ‘I’ll take the Black one, too.’ That’s not what he actually said, but that’s the way I like to put it.”

His performance Jane Alexander in Great White Hope (she also earned a Tony) netted him the cover of Newsweek magazine in October 1968 (headline: “New Star on Broadway”), and for the film version, he would become only the second Black man (after Sidney Poitier) to score a best actor Oscar nom.

When director George Lucas was searching for bass voice for Darth Vader as he was casting Star Wars (1977), he considered Orson Welles but felt his voice might be too recognizable. So he called Jones’ agent and asked if the actor would like a day’s work.

While traveling cross-country, Jones broke out his Darth Vader voice on the CB radio scanner. “The truck drivers would really freak out — for them, it was Darth Vader. I had to stop doing that,” he told The New York Times magazine.

As for voicing his character in The Lion King, Jones said in a 2011 interview that he still got a kick out of meeting kids who were devoted to the 1994 Disney classic.

“Their parents will say, ‘There’s Mufasa!’ But I don’t look like a lion, and if they’re real little kids, they think they’re being shafted or having the wool pulled over their eyes,” he said. “And I can’t roar to prove it to them, but I can say [in Mufasa’s voice], ‘Simba. You have deliberately disobeyed me!’”

Jones also was known as the “voice” of CNN

Onscreen, Jones also was memorable as “Few Clothes” Johnson in John Sayles’ Matewan (1987), as Rev. Stephen Kumalo in the apartheid drama Cry, the Beloved Country (1995) and as Robert Duvall’s embittered half-brother in A Family Thing (1996).

Emmy Awards

Jones’ two Emmys came in 1991 for playing a private detective who was wrongly imprisoned on the short-lived ABC drama Gabriel’s Fire and as the owner of a shoe-repair business in the TNT telefilm Heat Wave, about the 1965 Los Angeles Watts riots.

Among the roles he played onstage were: Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; President Arthur Hockstader in The Best Man; and chauffeur Hoke Colburn in Driving Miss Daisy, opposite Angela Lansbury.

In 2022, the 110-year-old Cort Theatre on Broadway was renamed The James Earl Jones Theatre in his honor.

He met his second wife, actress Cecilia Hart, while they were taping the CBS police drama Paris, in which he starred as a police captain and she played a young cop. They were married in 1982 and had a son, Flynn. Hart died in October 2016 of ovarian cancer at age 68.