James Earl Jones, a Mississippi native who was one of America’s most beloved actors, died Monday. He was 93.

Jones appeared in more than 200 movies, television shows and stage productions during a career that spanned 60 years.  Among his most famous movie roles were supporting and starring parts in “Patriot Games,” “Field of Dreams,” “The Hunt for Red October,” “Coming To America” and “Dr. Strangelove.”

In a 1996 interview with the American Academy of Achievement, Jones said his passion for acting flowed from being afraid to speak at all during his childhood because of a severe stutter.

Jones was born in Arkabutla, in the Mississippi Delta about 45 miles south of Memphis, in 1931. He moved to Michigan with his grandparents when he was 5.

“It wasn’t acting. It was language. It was speech. It was the thing that I’d been denied all those years and had denied myself all those years,” Jones said then. “I now had a great — an abnormal — appreciation for it, you know. And it was the idea that you can do a play — like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever — and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life. You could say these things! That’s what it’s still about, whether it’s the movies or TV or what.”

Jones’ booming baritone was one of the most iconic voices in entertainment. In addition to his on-screen roles, he provided the voice of Darth Vader in the “Star Wars” saga, Mufasa in “The Lion King” franchise, and did voiceovers in a number of video games and cartoons.

The cable news network CNN has used his “This … is CNN” voiceover as a trademark introduction since the 1980s.

Jones had been working on Broadway as recently as 2016 and had three dozen stage credits for various productions.

His final film credit was as Darth Vader in the Disney+ series “Obi-Wan Kenobi” in 2022, although that was done using artificial intelligence technology and archived audio. His last on-screen appearance was in 2021’s “Coming 2 America.”

Jones was in an exclusive club of “EGOT” actors who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony for their work. He won an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2011; three Emmy awards for television roles; three Tony awards for his theater work on Broadway; and one Spoken Word Grammy in 1977.

In all, he received 20 nominations in the various EGOT categories.

After his family moved to Michigan, Jones developed a severe stutter as a child and refused to speak until he was in high school.

“I resigned to it as a kid. I guess I was then about — from 10 years old — when I was approaching serious schoolwork, you had to really report what you knew, and the teacher accepted that I could do all my reporting with a pencil. I didn’t have to speak,” Jones said in the 1996 interview with the American Academy of Achievement. “Oral examinations? I did all mine written. And I became just a non-verbal person. I became a writer. And I was resigned to that. That was OK.”

A high school English teacher helped Jones overcome his stutter by challenging him to write and read poetry aloud to his class.

“It wasn’t that I stopped talking, it’s that I resolved that talking was too difficult,” Jones said in the 1996 interview. “You see, in the move from Mississippi to Michigan, you would think it would be a jubilant journey for a young boy of — I was then 5 years old — going to the promised land, you know. For me though, it was leaving the soil that I had touched with my bare feet, and I didn’t know if I’d ever touch soil with my bare feet again, and that was traumatic for me. I was leaving a Huck Finn world. Forget social problems, I was leaving the earth of Mississippi, the clay soil along the banks of the Mississippi River. And that was a trauma for me.”

Jones served in the U.S. Army in the late 1950s. He attended Ranger School and received his Ranger Tab and was eventually promoted to first lieutenant before his discharge.

He began his acting career in 1953, while a student at the University of Michigan, and made his Broadway debut in 1957. His film debut came in 1964, in the classic Stanley Kubrick movie, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” as the young Lt. Lothar Zogg, the B-52 bombardier.

Jones was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award in 1970 for his role as Jack Johnson in “The Great White Hope.” He was the second Black male performer nominated for Best Actor, but he did not win and was never nominated for another of his many roles.

“I know actors who, at that time, were better than I was … And I think, on the other end, there were actors who were not as good as I was, perhaps who could have hung in too, but began to blame everything on race,” Jones said in 1996. “And I did none of these things. I sort of stayed straight, you know, and square. Very, very square, but always able to walk straight in line, you know, toward my goal. Toward it. The goal was not really important.

“The goal wasn’t to be a millionaire or to be a Hollywood star. That was not the goal. The goal was something about — the goal was to find the goal, but I knew where it was,” Jones continued. “It had to do with getting on that stage and finding better and better plays — and hopefully movie scripts — to do. To be a part of good story telling. The goal was about that. And nothing threw me off, neither poverty nor discouragement. Nothing threw me off.”