Tommy Lee Jones born September 15, 1946 is an American actor and film director. He has received four Academy Award nominations, winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard in the 1993 thriller film The Fugitive.
His other notable starring roles include Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call in the television miniseries Lonesome Dove, Agent K in the Men in Black film series, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men, the villain Two-Face in Batman Forever, terrorist William “Bill” Strannix in Under Siege, Texas Ranger Roland Sharp in Man of the House, rancher Pete Perkins in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which he also directed, Colonel Chester Phillips in Captain America: The First Avenger, CIA Director Robert Dewey in Jason Bourne, and Warden Dwight McClusky in Natural Born Killers.
Jones has also portrayed real-life figures such as businessman Howard Hughes in The Amazing Howard Hughes, Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens in Lincoln, executed murderer Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song, U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur in Emperor, businessman Clay Shaw, the only person prosecuted in connection with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in JFK, Oliver Vanetta “Doolittle” Lynn, in Coal Miner’s Daughter, and baseball player Ty Cobb in Cobb.
Early life
Jones as a junior in high school, 1964
Jones was born on September 15, 1946, in San Saba, Texas. His mother, Lucille Marie (née Scott; 1928–2013), was a police officer, school teacher, and beauty shop owner, and his father, Clyde C. Jones (1926–1986), was an oil field worker. The two were married and divorced twice. He has said that he is of part Cherokee descent. He was raised in Midland, Texas, and attended Robert E. Lee High School.
Jones soon moved to Dallas and graduated from the St. Mark’s School of Texas in 1965, which he attended on scholarship.
College
He attended Harvard College on a need-based scholarship. He was the roommate of future Vice President Al Gore. As an upperclassman, he stayed in Dunster House with roommates Gore and Bob Somerby, who later became editor of the media criticism site The Daily Howler. Jones graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1969; his senior thesis was on “the mechanics of Catholicism” in the works of Flannery O’Connor.
College football
| No. 61 | |
|---|---|
| Position | Guard |
| Major | English |
| Career history | |
| College |
|
| High school | St. Mark’s (TX) |
| Personal information | |
| Born: | September 15, 1946 (age 74) San Saba, Texas |
| Height | 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m) |
| Weight | 200 lb (91 kg) |
| Career highlights and awards | |
|
|
Jones played guard on Harvard’s undefeated 1968 football team. He was named as a first-team All-Ivy League selection, and played in the 1968 Game. The game featured a memorable and last-minute Harvard 16-point comeback to tie Yale. He recounted his memory of “the most famous football game in Ivy League history” in the documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.
Career
Early acting and film (1960s–1980)
Jones in August 2006
Jones moved to New York to become an actor, making his Broadway debut in 1969’s A Patriot for Me in a number of supporting roles. In 1970, he landed his first film role, coincidentally playing a Harvard student in Love Story (Erich Segal, the author of Love Story, said that he based the lead character of Oliver on aspects of two undergraduate roommates he knew while on a sabbatical at Harvard, Jones and Al Gore).
In early 1971, he returned to Broadway in Abe Burrows’ Four on a Garden where he shared the stage with Carol Channing and Sid Caesar. Between 1971 and 1975 he portrayed Dr. Mark Toland on the ABC soap opera, One Life to Live. He returned to the stage for a short-lived 1974 production of Ulysses in Nighttown with Zero Mostel, directed by Burgess Meredith. It was followed by the acclaimed TV movie The Amazing Howard Hughes, where he played the lead role.
In films, he played an escaped convict hunted in Jackson County Jail (1976), a Vietnam veteran in Rolling Thunder (1977), an automobile mogul, co-starring with Laurence Olivier in the Harold Robbins drama The Betsy, and Police Detective ‘John Neville’ opposite Faye Dunaway in the 1978 thriller Eyes of Laura Mars.
In 1980, Jones earned his first Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of country singer Loretta Lynn’s husband, Doolittle “Mooney” Lynn, in the popular Coal Miner’s Daughter. In 1981, he played a drifter opposite Sally Field in Back Roads, a comedy that received middling reviews.
Increased exposure (1983–2004)
In 1983, he received an Emmy for Best Actor for his performance as murderer Gary Gilmore in a TV adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. That same year he starred in a pirate adventure, Nate and Hayes, playing the heavily bearded pirate Captain Bully Hayes.
In 1989, he earned another Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call in the acclaimed television mini-series Lonesome Dove, based on the best-seller by Larry McMurtry.
In the 1990s, blockbuster hits such as JFK co-starring Kevin Costner, The Fugitive co-starring Harrison Ford, Batman Forever co-starring Val Kilmer, and Men in Black with Will Smith made Jones one of the highest paid and most in-demand actors in Hollywood. His performance as Deputy U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard in The Fugitive received broad acclaim and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and a sequel. When he accepted his Oscar, his head was shaved for his role in the film Cobb, which he made light of in his speech: “The only thing a man can say at a time like this is ‘I am not really bald’. Actually I’m lucky to be working”.
Among his other well-known performances during the 1990s were those of the accused conspirator Clay Shaw/Clay Bertrand in the 1991 film JFK (which earned him another Oscar nomination), as a terrorist who hijacks a U.S. Navy battleship in Under Siege and as a maximum-security prison warden who’s in way over his head in Natural Born Killers. He also played the role of “Reverend” Roy Foltrigg in the 1994 film The Client.
Jones co-starred with director Clint Eastwood as astronauts in the 2000 film Space Cowboys, in which both played retired pilots and friends/rivals leading a space rescue mission together.
Later years (2005–present)
Jones at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival
In 2005, the first theatrical feature film Jones directed, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, was presented at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Jones’s character speaks both English and Spanish in the film. His performance won him the Best Actor Award at Cannes. His first film as a director had been The Good Old Boys in 1995, a made-for-television movie.
Two strong performances in 2007 marked a resurgence in Jones’s career, one as a beleaguered father investigating the disappearance of his soldier son in In the Valley of Elah, the other as a Texas sheriff hunting an assassin in the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. For the former, he was nominated for an Academy Award.