#king lear (2008)

[bookholichany]

David Tennant (1999)/ Ben Meyjes(2008)/ Andrew Scott (2018)

As Edgar in King Lear

[evilsausageflavouredpretzel]

watched king lear for the first time earlier and honestly. what the fuck. absolutely batshit play. 10/10 would watch again

[nymphoutofwater]

Here's a remade masterpost of free and full shakespeare adaptations! Thanks @william-shakespeare-official for this excellent post. Unfortunately, a lot of the links in it are broken, so I thought I'd make an updated version (also I just wanted to organize things a bit more)

Antony and Cleopatra: ~ Josette Simon, Antony Byrne & Ben Allen - 2017

As You Like It: ~ At Wolfe Park - 2013 ~ Kenneth Brannagh's - 2006

Coriolanus: ~ NYET Alumni - 2016 ~ Tom Hiddleston - 2014 ~ Ralph Fiennes - 2011

Cymbelline: ~ Michael Almereyda's - 2014

Hamlet: ~ David Tennant - 2009 ~ Ethan Hawke & Diane Venora - 2000 ~ Kenneth Branagh's - 1989 ~ BCC's Part One & Two - 1990 ~ Broadway - 1964 ~ Christopher Plummer - 1964 ~ Laurence Olivier's - 1948

Henry IV: ~ BBC's Part One & Two - 1989 ~ The Brussel's Shakespeare Society's - 2017

Henry V: ~ The BBC's - 1990 ~ Laurence Olivier's - 1944

Julius Caesar: ~ Phyllida Lloyd's - 2019 ~ The BBC's - 1979 ~ John Gielgud - 1970

King Lear: ~ The RSC's - 2008 ~ Laurence Olivier - 1983 ~ The BBC's - 1975 ~ James Earl Jones - 1974 ~ Orson Wells - 1953

Love's Labour's Lost: ~ Calvin University - 2016

Macbeth: ~ Stockbridge Drama Society's - 2019 ~ The RSC's - 2019 ~ Antoni Cimolino & Shelagh O'Brien's - 2017 ~ Ian McKellen & Judi Dench - 1969 ~ Sean Connery - 1961

Measure for Measure: ~ Hugo Weaving - 2019 ~ The BBC's - 1990

The Merchant of Venice: ~ Al Pacino - 2004 ~ Trevor Nunn & Chris Hunt - 2001 ~ The BBC's - 1980 ~ Lawrence Olivier - 1973

The Merry Wives of Windsor: ~ The Royal Shakespeare Company's - 1982

A Midsummer Night's Dream: ~ Oliver Chris & Gwendoline Christie - 2019 ~ City of Columbus's - 2018 ~ Julie Taymor's - 2014 ~ The Globe's - 2013 ~ The BBC's - 1988 ~ Lindsay Duncan & Alex Jennings - 1986

Much Ado About Nothing: ~ Shakespeare in the Park - 2019 ~ Kenneth Branagh - 1993 ~ The BBC's - 1984

Othello: ~ The BBC's Part One & Two - 1990

Richard II: ~ David Tennant - 2013 ~ Deborah Warner's - 1997 ~ The BBC's - 1978

Richard III: ~ Ian McKellen - 1995 ~ Laurence Olivier - 1955

Romeo and Juliet: ~ Simon Godwin's - 2021 ~ The BBC's - 1988 ~ Laurence Harvey & Susan Shentall - 1954

The Taming of the Shrew: ~ Ontario production? ~ American Conservatory Theater - 1976 ~ Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor - 1967 ~ Mary Pickford & Samuel Taylor - 1929

The Tempest: ~ Gregory Doran's - 2017 ~ The BBC's - 1988

Timon of Athens: ~ Barry Avrich's - 2024

Troilus and Cressida: ~ Audio Production ~ This one I found on youtube? - 2016

Titus Andronicus: ~ Anthony Hopkins - 1999

Twelfth night: ~ Texas Shakespeare Festival's - 2015 ~ Alec Guinness, Joan Plowright & Ralph Richardson - 1970

Two Gentlemen of Verona: ~ Katherine Steweart's - 2018 ~ The BBC's

The Winter's Tale: ~ Antony Sher - 1999 (Warning: they don't have a bear...)

Bonuses:

Time Loop Hamlet! (A personal fav of mine)

Rock Opera Hamlet???

Shakespeare animated tales

The Complete Works Of Shakespeare Abridged comedy

Romeo and Julieta: A Día de los Muertos Love Story

There’s also many other Latine Shakespeare adaptations listed in this archive

MacChef, a retelling but well... in a kitchen!

From the original post:

A Midwinter's Tale, about a man trying to make Hamlet.

Russian Hamlet here

Here's Scotland, PA, the 2001 modern Macbeth retelling.

Rave Macbeth for anyone interested is here.

This one is the Taming of the Shrew modern retelling.

The french Romeo & Juliet musical with English subtitles is here!

Here's the 1948 one,

the Orson Wells Othello movie with Portuguese subtitles there

A Lego adaptation of Othello here.

Here's commentary on David Tennant's Richard II

[demifiendrsa]

EGOT winning american film, television, and broadway actor James Earl Jones has passed away on September 9, 2024 at the age of 93.

Jones made his film debut in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. He received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Claudine. Jones gained international fame for his voice role as Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, beginning with the original 1977 film. Jones' other notable roles include in Conan the Barbarian, Matewan, Coming to America, Field of Dreams, The Hunt for Red October, The Sandlot, and the voice of Mufasa in The Lion King. Jones reprised his roles in Star Wars media, The Lion King (2019) remake, and Coming 2 America.

Jones' television work includes playing Woodrow Paris in the series Paris between 1979 and 1980. He voiced various characters on the animated series The Simpsons in three separate seasons. He then was cast as Gabriel Bird, the lead role in the series Gabriel's Fire which aired from 1990 to 1991. For that role, he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and was nominated for his fourth Golden Globe Award, this time for Best Actor in a Television Series Drama. He played Bird again in the series Pros and Cons, which ran from 1991 to 1992; that earned him his fifth and final Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series Drama. He then had small appearances in the series Law & Order, Picket Fences , Mad About You, Touched by an Angel, Frasier. His role in Picket Fences earned him another Primetime Emmy Award nomination, one for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series. His later television work includes small roles in Everwood, Two and a Half Men, House, and The Big Bang Theory.

Jones' theater work includes numerous Broadway plays, including Sunrise at Campobello (1958–1959), Danton's Death (1965), The Iceman Cometh (1973–1974), Of Mice and Men (1974–1975), Othello (1982), On Golden Pond (2005), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (2008) and You Can't Take It with You (2014–2015). He was also in various off Broadway productions and Shakespeare stage adaptations such as The Merchant of Venice (1962), The Winter's Tale (1963), Othello (1964–1965), Coriolanus (1965), Hamlet (1972), and King Lear (1973). His roles in The Great White Hope (1969) and Fences (1987) earned him two Tony Awards, both for Best Leading Actor in a Play.

[one-time-i-dreamt]

The hot new thing on Tumblr was the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear with Ian McKellen, so every meme and reaction image was just screencaps from King Lear.

[april-is]

April 29, 2025: Greensickness, Laurel Chen

Greensickness Laurel Chen

after Gwendolyn Brooks

My wild grief didn’t know where to end. Everywhere I looked: a field alive and unburied. Whole swaths of green swallowed the light. All around me, the field was growing. I grew out My hair in every direction. Let the sun freckle my face. Even in the greenest depths, I crouched Towards the light. That summer, everything grew So alive and so alone. A world hushed in green. Wildest grief grew inside out.

I crawled to the field’s edge, bruises blooming In every crevice of my palms. I didn’t know I’d reached a shoreline till I felt it There: A salt wind lifted The hair from my neck. At the edge of every green lies an ocean. When I saw that blue, I knew then: This world will end.

Grief is not the only geography I know. Every wound closes. Repair comes with sweetness, Come spring. Every empire will fall: I must believe this. I felt it Somewhere in the field: my ancestors Murmuring Go home, go home—soon, soon. No country wants me back anymore and I’m okay.

If grief is love with nowhere to go, then Oh, I’ve loved so immensely. That summer, everything I touched Was green. All bruises will fade From green and blue to skin. Let me grow through this green And not drown in it. Let me be lawless and beloved, Ungovernable and unafraid. Let me be brave enough to live here. Let me be precise in my actions. Let me feel hurt. I know I can heal. Let me try again—again and again.

--

From the author: "This poem was inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem 'To the Young Who Want to Die,’ which ends with the lines, ‘Graves grow no green that you can use. / Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.’ This poem articulates my belief that grief isn’t a dead thing; it’s very much alive and continues to shape how I grow and live in this world. This poem says: healing is forever, another world is possible, and no nation will protect us, only we will."

Today in: 2024: from Gaza, Summer 2006, Jasmine Donahaye 2023: June, Alex Dimitrov 2022: Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be, Ross Gay 2021: Choi Jeong Min, Franny Choi 2020: Earl, Louis Jenkins 2019: Kul, Fatimah Asghar 2018: My Life Was the Size of My Life, Jane Hirshfield 2017: I Would Ask You To Reconsider The Idea That Things Are As Bad As They’ve Ever Been, Hanif Abdurraqib 2016: Tired, Langston Hughes 2015: Democracy, Langston Hughes 2014: Postscript, Seamus Heaney 2013: The Ghost of Frank O’Hara, John Yohe 2012: All Objects Reveal Something About the Body, Catie Rosemurgy 2011: Prayer, Marie Howe 2010: The Talker, Chelsea Rathburn 2009: There Are Many Theories About What Happened, John Gallagher 2008: bon bon il est un pays, Samuel Beckett 2007: Root root root for the home team, Bob Hicok 2006: Fever 103°, Sylvia Plath 2005: King Lear Considers What He’s Wrought, Melissa Kirsch

[aq2003]

making a list of david tennant's shakespeare roles, let me know if i missed anything (italicized the ones without a recording)

touchstone (as you like it - 1996 - stage)

angelo (measure for measure - 1997 - one scene in a tv documentary)

edward the black prince (edward iii - 1999 - staged reading)

edgar (king lear - 1999 - stage)

antipholus of syracuse (comedy of errors - 2000 - stage)

romeo (romeo and juliet - 2000 - stage)

lysander/flute (midsummer - 2001 - semi-staged reading?)

henry vi (h6 1-3, r3 - 2000/4 - audio)

benedick (much ado - 2001 - audio)

launcelot gobbo (merchant of venice - 2004 - audio)

edgar (king lear - 2005 - audio)

antipholus of syracuse (the comedy of errors - 2005 - audio)

the porter (macbeth - 2005 - audio)

mercutio (romeo and juliet - 2005 - audio)

hamlet (2008/9 - stage/film)

berowne (love's labour's lost - 2008 - stage)

benedick (much ado - 2011 - stage)

malvolio (twelfth night - 2012 - audio)

prince escalus (romeo and juliet - 2012 - audio)

richard ii (2013/6 - stage)

macbeth (2022 - audio)

macbeth (2023/4 - stage)

edmund (king lear - 2025 - audio)

[uglyhandz]

The old man yaoi between King Lear (Sir Ian McKellen) and The Fool (Sylvester McCoy) in this 2008 adaptation goes kinda hard.

I don't know what these two got going on and I don't know that I wanna know...

[prince-of-rot]

So back in 2008, I came across a strange book at my university called The Devil in Legend and Literature by Maximilian Rudwin. It was written in 1931 and the author was attempting to put together a synopsis of how the Devil (and demons) has been written about and how that image has changed or persisted in legend and literature. One would categorize the work as academic Romantic Satanism. I read the whole thing cover-to-cover multiple times and eventually found my own copy at a thrift store in 2011.

I decided to revisit that text today and came across this delightful and bizarre little snippet from the chapter on Asmodeus.

This is from King Lear of course but it goes uncited and is assumed knowledge for the reader. It also makes it sound like old William and Asmodeus were card playing and drinking buddies who chatted on the regular? It’s so bizarre.

It has lived in my head rent free for 16 years now and I want to find Rudwin’s ghost and shake him and ask him why he wrote this.

[heavenboy09]

Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 To You

The 1# Legendary Japanese 🇯🇵 Actor & Martial Artist 🥋Of Cinema 🎥 Before & Today

Born in Tokyo, he was scouted by an entertainer while playing with the son of the actor Kokichi Takada who lived in the same condominium, and after working as a model for a magazine for young children, he joined the Himawari Theatre Group at the age of five. He made his film debut in 1966 in the ninkyo yakuza film Game of Chance (浪曲子守唄) starring Shinichi "Sonny" Chiba, reprising his role as Chiba's character's son in two sequels released the following year.

He is a Japanese actor and martial artist. He began his career in the mid-1960's at the age of six, and gained prominence for his roles in Japanese and Hong Kong action films, later establishing himself as a dramatic actor.

He made his first major Hollywood appearance portraying Ujio in The Last Samurai (2003), later appearing in such films as Sunshine (2007), Speed Racer (2008), The Wolverine, 47 Ronin (both 2013), Minions (2015), Life (2017), Avengers: Endgame (2019), Army of the Dead (2021), Bullet Train (2022), and John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023). He also had a recurring role on the HBO series Westworld (2018–2020).

He is best known to international audiences for his roles as Ryuji Takayama in Ring (1998), Seibei Iguchi in The Twilight Samurai (2002), Ujio in The Last Samurai (2003), Kenji in Rush Hour 3 (2007), and Hanzo Hasashi / Scorpion in Mortal Kombat (2021).

His role as 'The Fool' in the Shakespeare play King Lear also gave him notable theatrical notice in the United Kingdom.He has received numerous accolades, including two Japan Academy Film Prizes, three Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Actor, four Kinema Junpo Awards, and honors from the Yokohama Film Festival.

In 2018, he received the Medals of Honor with Purple Ribbon from the Japanese government for his "artistic developments, improvements and accomplishments."

Please Wish This Legendary & Incredible Japanese 🇯🇵 Actor & Martial Artist 🥋Of Years Of Outstanding Cinema 🎥 & Also Shares The Same Birthday with, The Legendary Aussie Actor, Hugh Jackman. Who has starred a movie in with, A Very Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊

IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN HIS MOVIES. YOU WILL

IF YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD OF HIM. ITS OKAY YOU DEFINITELY WILL NOW.

THE 1 & THE ONLY

MR. HIROYUKI SANADA 🇯🇵 AKA SCORPION 🦂 OF THE 2021 REBOOT, MORTAL KOMBAT🥋 👊

GET OVER HERE 🦂

#HiroyukiSanada #TheWolverine #47Ronin #Extant #MortalKombat #Shogun #Scorpion #YoshiiTornaga

[justaboutdead]

~~~Welcome to my Blog~~~

Hey y'all, I'm Ramie, welcome to my blog! I'm a weird trans girl who loves tabletop role-playing games, mecha, board games, horror, math, science, and storytelling! My hobbies include painting minis and folding origami. If you have any questions or considerations, please tell me!

I write ttrpgs, check them out here: https://socialistwolfgirl.itch.io/

Bluesky: @socialistwolfgirl.itch.io

Magic: the Gathering player? Check out my current commander decks here: https://archidekt.com/folders/921877

Important posts:

Old pinned post (a call to action): https://www.tumblr.com/justaboutdead/733270259035963392/emergency-notice-there-is-a-severe-lack-of-sexy?source=share

Citizen Sleeper Essay: https://www.tumblr.com/justaboutdead/780597556942127104/a-brief-informal-analysis-of-citizen-sleeper-1-and?source=share

Daisy Bell Essay: https://www.tumblr.com/justaboutdead/741112113719918592/house-of-leaves-2001-and-daisy-bell-and-why-its?source=share

On the Beach Essay (that got fully eaten by the tumblr algorithm before): https://www.tumblr.com/justaboutdead/738034545041014784/on-the-beach-by-nevil-schute-and-running-out-of?source=share

Quick Recommendations below the keep reading (trying to avoid super duper common ones):

Video-games: Rainworld, Outer WIlds, Lunacid, South Scrimshaw Pt. 1, Soma, Darksouls II (it's the best one, sorry), How Fish is Made, Devil Daggers, Dusk, Northern Journey, Citizen Sleeper 1+2, Caves of Qud, Armored Core For Answer (6 is very good too and more accessible), A Short Hike, Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag..., If Found

Tabletop Role-playing Games: Mork-Borg, Deadlands, Ex-Novo, Dialect, Orbital Blues, Mothership, Salvage Union, Do You Remember Rock?, Death in Space

Books: Annihilation, Wolf in White Van, Roadside Picnic, Cat's Cradle, The Lathe of Heaven, Monstrous Regiment

Films: The Thing(1984), The Wind Rises, When Marnie Was There, Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door, Blood Tea and Red String, Abe Lincoln Vampire Slayer (great Discord movie), Stalker (1979), The Wicker Man (1973), Rocky Horror Picture Show (Ofc)

Shows: Cowboy Bebop, Gunbuster (1988), Skip and Loafer, Midnight Mass (pretty neat for a modern netflix show) (sorry i dont watch that many shows)

(Recordings of) Plays: Vanya w Andrew Scott, Abigail Thorn's The Prince, 2008 King Lear with Ian McKellan, Falsettos pro shot, and (for Sillys) Overly Sarcastic Production's Macbeth,

Bands: The Mountain Goats, Laura Jane Grace/Against Me!, Dear Landlord, Sincere Engineer, This Will Destroy You, Onsind, Rutterkin, HappyHappy, The Menzingers

Other: Oxventure (ttrpg actual play studio), Libre Office Suite (Free computer software)

My Setup:

Keyboard: Keychron Q14 pro + Duckypad diy macropad

Mouse: Razor Deathadder v3

Headphones: Beyerdynamic DT 770 pros

General Specs: AMD Ryzen 9 5900x, NVIDIA RTX 4070, 64 gigs of ram, and 7 noctua nf-f12 ippc 3000 PWMs so I can rev it like a motorcycle

(yeah, im lucky enough to have disposable income, and people from which I have been able to source a lot of parts/peripherals used for cheap over the years)

[gnome-adjacent-vagabond]

I've consumed like four different versions of King Lear this week, two of which were filmed, but one shot of Jonathan Hyde as the Earl of Kent consumed me so completely that I spent one dollar on samsung stickers to bring my vision to life.

[whileiamdying]

James Earl Jones, Whose Powerful Acting Resonated Onstage and Onscreen, Dies at 93

He gave life to characters like Darth Vader in “Star Wars” and Mufasa in “The Lion King,” and went on to collect Tonys, Golden Globes, Emmys and an honorary Oscar.

James Earl Jones in 1980. He climbed to Broadway and Hollywood stardom with talent, drive and remarkable vocal cords.Credit...M. Reichenthal/Associated Press

Published Sept. 9, 2024 Updated Sept. 10, 2024, 1:30 a.m. ET

James Earl Jones, a stuttering farm child who became a voice of rolling thunder as one of America’s most versatile actors in a stage, film and television career that plumbed race relations, Shakespeare’s rhapsodic tragedies and the faceless menace of Darth Vader, died on Monday at his home in Dutchess County, N.Y. He was 93.

The office of his agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed the death in a statement.

From destitute days working in a diner and living in a $19-a-month cold-water flat, Mr. 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. All had much to do with his success.

So did plays by Howard Sackler and August Wilson that let a young actor explore racial hatred in the national experience; television soap operas that boldly cast a Black man as a doctor in the 1960s; and a decision by George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars,” to put an anonymous, rumbling African American voice behind the grotesque mask of the galactic villain Vader.

Mr. Jones in 1979 as the author Alex Haley on “Roots: The Next Generation.” Credit...Warner Brothers Television, via Everett Collection

The rest was accomplished by Mr. Jones himself: a prodigious body of work that encompassed scores of plays, nearly 90 television network dramas and episodic series, and some 120 movies. They included his voice work, much of it uncredited, in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, in the credited voice-over of Mufasa in “The Lion King,” Disney’s 1994 animated musical film, and in his reprise of the role in Jon Favreau’s computer-animated remake in 2019.

Mr. Jones was no matinee idol, like Cary Grant or Denzel Washington. But his bulky Everyman suited many characters, and his range of forcefulness and subtlety was often compared to Morgan Freeman’s. Nor was he a singer; yet his voice, though not nearly as powerful, was sometimes likened to that of the great Paul Robeson. Mr. Jones collected Tonys, Golden Globes, Emmys, Kennedy Center honors and an honorary Academy Award.

Under the artistic and competitive demands of daily stage work and heavy commitments to television and Hollywood — pressures that burn out many actors — Mr. Jones was a rock. He once appeared in 18 plays in 30 months. He often made a half-dozen films a year, in addition to his television work. And he did it for a half-century, giving thousands of performances that captivated audiences, moviegoers and critics.

They were dazzled by his presence. A bear of a man — 6 feet 2 inches and 200 pounds — he dominated a stage with his barrel chest, large head and emotional fires, tromping across the boards and spitting his lines into the front rows. And audiences were mesmerized by the voice. It was Lear’s roaring crash into madness, Othello’s sweet balm for Desdemona, Oberon’s last rapture for Titania, the queen of the fairies on a midsummer night.

Mr. Jones as Othello in the Broadway revival of the play in New York in 1981. Credit...Martha Swope/The New York Public Library

He liked to portray kings and generals, garbage men and bricklayers; perform Shakespeare in Central Park and the works of August Wilson and Athol Fugard on Broadway. He could strut and court lecherously, erupt with rage or melt tenderly; play the blustering Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (2008) or an aging Norman Thayer Jr. in Ernest Thompson’s confrontation with mortality, “On Golden Pond” (2005).

Some theatergoers, aware of Mr. Jones’s childhood affliction, discerned occasional subtle hesitations in his delivery of lines. The pauses were deliberate, he said, a technique of self-restraint learned by stutterers to control involuntary repetitions. Far from detracting from his lucidity, the pauses usually added force to an emotional moment.

Mr. Jones profited from a deep analysis of meaning in his lines. “Because of my muteness,” he said in “Voices and Silences,” a 1993 memoir written with Penelope Niven, “I approached language in a different way from most actors. I came at language standing on my head, turning words inside out in search of meaning, making a mess of it sometimes, but seeing truth from a very different viewpoint.”

Mr. Jones playing the fictional former U.S. President Arthur Hockstader in Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man” on Broadway in 2012. Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Another of his theatrical techniques was to stand alone for a few minutes in a darkened wing before the curtain went up, settling himself and silently evoking the emotion he needed for the first scene. It became a nightly ritual during performances of Mr. Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Fences” (1987), in which Mr. Jones portrayed a sanitation worker brooding over broken dreams, his once promising baseball career cut short by big league racial barriers. It ran for 15 months on Broadway, and Mr. Jones won a Tony for best actor.

Voice of Vader

Mr. Jones’s technique in the first “Star Wars” trilogy — “A New Hope” (1977), “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) and “Return of the Jedi” (1983) — was another trademark. To sustain Vader’s menace — a voice to go with his black cape and a helmet that filtered his hissing breath and evil tidings — Mr. Jones spoke in a narrowly inflected range, almost a monotone, to make nearly every phrase sound threatening. (He was credited for voice work in the third film, but, at his request, he was not credited in the first two until a special edition rerelease in 1997.)

Mr. Jones was one of the first Black actors to appear regularly on the daytime soaps, playing a doctor in “The Guiding Light” and in “As the World Turns” in the 1960s. Television became a staple of his career. He appeared in the dramatic series “The Defenders,” “Dr. Kildare,” “Touched by an Angel” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and in mini-series, including “Roots: The Next Generation” (1979), playing the author Alex Haley.

Mr. Jones and Diana Sands in the 1960s in the dramatic television series “East Side, West Side.” His prodigious body of work included nearly 90 television network dramas and episodic series. Credit...Everett Collection

Mr. Jones’s first Hollywood role was small but memorable, as the B-52 bombardier in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satire on nuclear war, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

While drama critics recorded his steady progress as an actor, Mr. Jones did not win film stardom until 1970, when he played Jack Jefferson, a character based on Jack Johnson, the first Black boxing champion, in “The Great White Hope,” reprising a role he performed on Broadway in 1968. He won a Tony for the stage work and was nominated for an Oscar for the movie.

Mr. Jones as Jack Jefferson in “The Great White Hope.” He won a Tony for his stage work in the role and was nominated for an Oscar for the movie version. Credit...George Tames/The New York Times

Although he was never active in the civil rights movement, Mr. Jones said early in his career that he admired Malcolm X and that he, too, might have been a revolutionary had he not become an actor.

He said his contributions to civil rights lay in roles that dealt with racial issues — and there were many. Notable among these was his almost overlooked casting in the 1961 play “The Blacks,” Jean Genet’s violent drama on race relations. It featured a cast that included Maya Angelou, Cicely Tyson, Louis Gossett Jr. and Billy Dee Williams, some wearing gruesome white masks, who night after night enacted in a kangaroo court the rape and murder of a white woman. Mr. Jones, the brutal and beguiling protagonist, found the role so emotionally draining that he left and then rejoined the cast several times in its three-and-a-half-year run Off Broadway.

But the experience helped clarify his feelings about race. “Through that role,” he told The Washington Post in 1967, “I came to realize that the Black man in America is the tragic hero, the Oedipus, the Hamlet, the Macbeth, even the working-class Willy Loman, the Uncle Tom and Uncle Vanya of contemporary American life.”

James Earl Jones was born in Arkabutla, Miss., on Jan. 17, 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, Mich.

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,” Mr. 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.

Years of Silence

Traumatized, James began to stammer. By age 8 he was stuttering so badly, and was so mortified by his affliction, that he stopped talking altogether, terrified that only gibberish would come out. In the one-room rural school he attended in Manistee County, Mich., he communicated by writing notes. Friendless, lonely, self-conscious and depressed, he endured years of silence and isolation.

“No matter how old the character I play,” Mr. Jones told Newsweek in 1968, “even if I’m playing Lear, those deep childhood memories, those furies, will come out. I understand this.”

Mr. Jones playing a South African priest in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1995). Credit...Miramax, via Alamy

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

“Just discovering the joy of communicating set it up for me, I think,” he told The New York Times in 1974. “In a very personal way, once I found out I could communicate verbally again, it became a very important thing for me, like making up for lost time, making up for the years that I didn’t speak.”

Mr. Jones as Big Daddy in a 2008 Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” With him was Terrence Howard. Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Mr. Jones enrolled at the University of Michigan on a scholarship, taking pre-med courses, and joined a drama group. With a growing interest in acting, he switched majors and focused on drama in the university’s School of Music, Theater and Dance. In a memoir, he said he left college in 1953 without a degree but resumed studies later to finish his required course work. He received a degree in drama in 1955.

In college, he had also joined the Army under an R.O.T.C. commitment, then washed out of infantry Ranger School. But he did so well in cold-weather training in the Rockies that he considered a military career. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in mid-1953, after the end of the Korean War, and was subsequently promoted to first lieutenant.

In 1955, however, he resigned his commission and moved to New York, determined to be an actor. He lived briefly with his father, whom he had met a few years earlier. Robert Jones had a modest acting career and offered encouragement. James found cheap rooms on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, took odd jobs and studied at the American Theater Wing and Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio.

A Run of Shakespeare

After minor roles in small productions, including three plays in which he performed with his father, he joined Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in 1960; over several years he appeared in “Henry V,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Richard III” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” During a long run as Othello in 1964, he fell in love with Julienne Marie, his Desdemona.

They were married in 1968, but they divorced in 1972. In 1982, he married the actress Cecilia Hart, who had also played Desdemona to one of his Othellos. She died in 2016. They had a son, Flynn Earl Jones, who survives him, along with a brother, Matthew.

In the 1970s and most of the ’80s, Mr. Jones was in constant demand for stage work in New York, films in Hollywood and television roles on both coasts. He took occasional breaks at a desert retreat near Los Angeles and at his home in Pawling, N.Y., in Dutchess County.

Mr. Jones in 2017 when he accepted a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement. Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

But his long run with “Fences” in 1987 and 1988, including a national tour, proved too taxing. He did not return to Broadway for many years, and made movies almost exclusively. His notable film roles included an oppressed coal miner in John Sayles’s “Matewan” (1987); the king of a fictional African nation in the John Landis comedy “Coming to America” (1988), a role he reprised at 90 in 2021 in “Coming 2 America”; an embittered but resilient writer in the baseball movie “Field of Dreams” (1989); and a South African priest in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1995).

Mr. Jones received the National Medal of the Arts from President George Bush at the White House in 1992, Kennedy Center honors in 2002, an honorary Oscar in 2011 for lifetime achievement, and in 2017 a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement, as well as an honorary doctor of arts degree from Harvard University.

In 2015, Mr. Jones and Cicely Tyson appeared in a Broadway revival of D.L. Coburn’s 1976 play, “The Gin Game,” portraying residents of a retirement home making nice, and sometimes not so nice, over a card table. For the 84-year-old Mr. Jones, it was, as The Times noted, his sixth Broadway role in the past decade.

In 2022, Broadway’s 110-year-old Cort Theater was renamed the James Earl Jones Theater.

[warningsine]

Relatability—a logism so neo that it’s not even recognized by the 2008 iteration of Microsoft Word with which these words are being written—has become widely and unthinkingly accepted as a criterion of value, even by people who might be expected to have more sophisticated critical tools at their disposal. 

[...]

Whence comes relatability? A hundred years ago, if someone said something was “relatable,” she meant that it could be told—the Shakespearean sense of “relate”—or that it could be connected to some other thing. As recently as a decade ago, even as “relatable” began to accrue its current meaning, the word remained uncommon. The contemporary meaning of “relatable”—to describe a character or a situation in which an ordinary person might see himself reflected—first was popularized by the television industry. 

[...]

What are the qualities that make a work “relatable,” and why have these qualities come to be so highly valued? To seek to see oneself in a work of art is nothing new, nor is it new to enjoy the sensation. Since Freud theorized the process of identification—as a means whereby an individual develops his or her personality through idealizing and imitating a parent or other figure—the concept has fruitfully been applied to the appreciation of the arts. Identification with a character is one of the pleasures of reading, or of watching movies, or of seeing plays, though if it is where one’s engagement with the work begins, it should not be where critical thought ends. The concept of identification implies that the reader or viewer is, to some degree at least, actively engaged with the work in question: she is thinking herself into the experience of the characters on the page or screen or stage.

But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.

To appreciate “King Lear”—or even “The Catcher in the Rye” or “The Fault in Our Stars”—only to the extent that the work functions as one’s mirror would make for a hopelessly reductive experience. But to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize—because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy—is our own failure. It’s a failure that has been dispiritingly sanctioned by the rise of “relatable.” In creating a new word and embracing its self-involved implications, we have circumscribed our own critical capacities. That’s what sucks, not Shakespeare.

[bewareofitalics]

Welp, finished Slings and Arrows, and I stand by my original feelings from 2008:

First of all, the depressing. :( I think I've mentioned before that I'm good with fictional evil but I (often) hate fictional unfair, and Season Three was all about fictional unfair. Especially unfair in that I liked Richard, darnit! Why did he have to go back to the dark side? Why couldn't he just enjoy musicals and be both happy and good? That scene he had when he was bonding with the composer was so cute, and then they had to go and ruin it all. Which brings me to my second point. Why did all the musical people have to be loathsome and/or complete idiots? At first the Sophie-Paul-Megan plot looked like it was going to give the musical people some dignity, but then it went in the opposite direction. As a lover of musicals with the greatest respect for people who perform them well, I was honestly offended. I expected better from a show created in part by Bob Martin. I can only imagine how offended I'd be if I'd done The Drowsy Chaperone with him. And the musical itself? Would any professional production actually succeed with choreography that bad? It was all indicating and jazz hands and everything people who hate musicals hate about musicals. Also, stupid plot and lyrics. I kind of want to write a fic where Megan's stupidity is all an elaborate acting exercise, and after East Hastings closes, she plays Isabella (or another suitably dignified Shakespearean) at Geoffrey's new theatre, while Sophie plays Francisca and Paul plays Varrius. And then they put on The Fantatsicks and everyone loves it and the festival begs Geoffrey to come back and he does and his first production is Jane Eyre and it's a huge hit and then they do Twelfth Night and it's another huge hit and they all love musicals and live happily ever after. Also, Megan plays Luisa, Jane, and Viola, and her name is actually [bewareofitalics]. So there!

I would add that this time it made me think of The Merchant of Venice, in that the Christian/non-musical characters come across as so awful that you might start to think you're supposed to be on the side of the Jewish/musical characters, but then, haha, nope! And that sounds like a very frivolous comparison, but honestly? As a person who is both Jewish and a fan of musicals? I find season three of Slings and Arrows as offensive as Merchant. Maybe even more offensive? I do rewatch it while I'd happily never see Merchant again, but like, at least Shakespeare probably didn't know any Jews personally!

Oh, and I'd add to my hypothetical fic that Richard finds his niche as a dramaturg. And actually maybe I'd just leave Geoffrey out of it. The whole thing happens at New Burbage after Richard realizes his mistake, fires Darren, and hires one of the other artistic director candidates. Anna can come back, though.

Also I'd say that while there's certainly a time and place for parodying things about musicals (and scifi TV shows!) that can be kind of silly, if you're doing it to contrast with King Lear played straight? That's just mean.