CHICAGO — It sounds like something you wouldn’t believe unless James Earl Jones said it himself in a voice-over. But it’s true: Millions of us have spent uncountable hours of our lives — gratefully — with the sound of Jones’ voice inside our heads.
Today, we are all Luke, and he is our father, because the farm boy born in Arkabutla, Miss., later raised by his grandparents on a farm near Wellston, Mich., is the one who said “I am your father.” He said it like he meant it, and we believed it in our bones, because that’s where Jones’ voice rattled and purred as Darth Vader in “The Empire Strikes Back” and other “Star Wars” pictures.
Jones, who died Sept. 9 at the age of 93 at his home in Dutchess County, N.Y., took on Shakespeare, the Greeks, Jean Genet and a hundred comedies, yet it’s the voice-over work that everyone’s talking about this week. He is, after all, the man who said “This is CNN” and CNN was instantly and for decades classier, more distinguished for it. Another hundred or thousand or million people will hear his voice once again, or maybe for the first time, as Mufasa in “The Lion King.”
There were, of course, a few other things for which James Earl Jones will be remembered.