James Earl Jones, acting great who voiced Star Wars villain Darth Vader, dies aged 93

The acting great James Earl Jones, who voiced Star Wars villain Darth Vader and Mufasa in The Lion King, has died at the age of 93.

Jones, a longtime sufferer of diabetes, died at his home surrounded by family members, his agent Barry McPherson said. No cause of death was provided.

He appeared in Conan the Barbarian, played Eddie Murphy’s dad in Coming to America and starred in The Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games.

But it was his iconic voice as the villainous Darth Vader for which he was best known.

Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, Vader's son in Star Wars, tweeted: "RIP dad."

Jones was one of the few entertainers to have won the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards). During his career, Jones won three Tony awards, including two Emmys and a Grammy, as well as an honorary Oscar in 2011 for lifetime achievement.

In 1971, he became only the second Black man nominated for an Academy Award for best actor, after Sidney Poitier.

Jones was the only member of The Lion King's original voice cast to retain his role for the movie's remake in 2019.

Fellow Star Wars actor Samuel L. Jackson previously said of him: "If you were an actor or aspired to be an actor, if you pounded the pavement in these streets looking for jobs, one of the standards we always had was to be a James Earl Jones."

One of Jones' earliest roles was a small part in Stanley Kubrick's famous Cold War satire, Dr Strangelove.

His long list of awards included Tonys for The Great White Hope in 1969 and Fences in 1987 on Broadway and Emmys in 1991 for Gabriel's Fire and Heat Wave on television.

He also won a Grammy for best spoken word album, Great American Documents in 1977.

Although he never won a competitive Academy award, he was nominated for best actor for the film version of The Great White Hope and was given an honorary Oscar in 2011.

Jones was "capable of moving in seconds from boyish ingenuousness to near-biblical rage and somehow suggesting all the gradations in between," the Washington Post wrote in a 1987 review of Fences.

From destitute days working in a diner and living in a $19-a-month cold-water flat, Jones climbed to Broadway and Hollywood stardom with talent, drive and remarkable vocal cords.

He was abandoned as a child by his parents, raised by a racist grandmother and mute for years in his stutterer’s shame, but he learned to speak again with a herculean will.

James Earl Jones was born in Arkabutla, Missisippi, on 17 January, 1931, to Robert Earl and Ruth (Connolly) Jones. About the time of his birth, his father left the family to chase prizefighting and acting dreams. His mother eventually obtained a divorce. But when James was 5 or 6, his frequently absent mother remarried, moved away and left him to be raised by her parents, John and Maggie Connolly, on a farm near Dublin, Michigan.

Abandonment by his parents left the boy with raw wounds and psychic scars. He referred to his mother as Ruth — he said he thought of her as an aunt — and he called his grandparents Papa and Mama, although even the refuge of his surrogate home with them was a troubled place to grow up.

“I was raised by a very racist grandmother, who was part Cherokee, part Choctaw and Black,” Jones told the BBC in a 2011 interview. “She was the most racist person, bigoted person I have ever known.” She blamed all white people for slavery, and Native American and Black people “for allowing it to happen,” he said, and her ranting compounded his emotional turmoil.

Traumatized, James began to stammer. By age 8 he was stuttering so badly, that he stopped talking altogether. In high school in nearby Brethren, an English teacher, Donald Crouch, began to help him. He found that James had a talent for poetry and encouraged him to write, and tentatively to stand before the class and read his lines. Gaining confidence, James recited a poem a day in class. The speech impediment subsided. He joined a debating team and entered oratorical contests. By graduation, in 1949, he had largely overcome his disability, although the effects lingered and never quite went away.

Years later, Jones came to believe that learning to control his stutter had led to his career as an actor.