In Remembrance: Robert Earl Jones

     Robert Earl Jones, the stage actor who appeared in supporting roles in such films as The Sting and Cotton Club, has passed away on September 7, 2006 in Englewood, NJ. He was 102.

     Born on February 3, 1904 in Senotobia, MS, Jones dropped out of school in the third grade to work as a sharecropper. In 1931, Jones left his wife and moved to Memphis where he got a job working on the railroad. After losing his railroad job in the Depression, he moved to Chicago to pursue a career as a boxer. As he claimed to be younger than he actually was at the time, the year of Jones’ birth would later be erroneously reported as 1911. His career as a prizefighter did not last long, though he did work for a time as heavyweight champion Joe Louis’ sparring partner.

     Jones entered acting after moving to New York City where he landed a job with the federal Works Progress Administration working with a group of youths who were approached by Harlem Renaissance poet/playwright Langston Hughes to appear in his one-act play Don’t You Want To Be Free? at the historic Harlem Suitcase Theatre. After one of the cast found a job and dropped out of the production, Hughes put Jones into the part.

     Although, Jones made his film debut soon after, appearing in two productions for pioneering writer/director Oscar Micheaux- Lying Lips (1939) and The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940), he stuck primarily with stage work. His acting career was temporarily derailed in the 1950s when he was blacklisted following his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

     Jones’ film career resumed in 1959 with a small, uncredited role in director Robert Wise’s crime drama Odds Against Tomorrow. Although he would still primarily work on the stage, he would make appearances in Terror In The City, One Potato, Two Potato (both 1964), The Sting (1973), Trading Places (1983), The Cotton Club (1984) and Witness (1985).

     Jones would continue to appear on stage in productions including Strange Fruit, The Iceman Cometh and Mule Bone. He appeared with his son, actor James Earl Jones, in stage productions of Infidel Caeser, Moon On A Rainbow Shawl and Of Mice And Men. In 1983 Jones founded the Harlem Folklore Theater as a place where women and minorities could Study acting.
 

     Jones’ final film appearance was in the 1992 drama Rain Without Thunder.