Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946) is an American actor and
director.
His film roles include federal marshal Samuel Gerard in
The Fugitive and
U.S. Marshals, the villain "
Two-Face" in
Batman Forever, the completely insane terrorist William Strannix in
Under Siege, the mysterious Agent K in the
Men in Black films, Western peace officers
Woodrow F. Call in
Lonesome Dove and Ed Tom Bell in
No Country for Old Men. Jones has also portrayed real-life figures such as billionaire
Howard Hughes, executed murderer
Gary Gilmore and baseball great
Ty Cobb.
Early life
Jones was born in
San Saba, Texas,
[www.nytimes.com/1993/08/01/movies/film-tommy-lee-jones-snarls-his-way-to-the-pinnacle.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=2] the son of Lucille Marie (
née Scott), a police officer, school teacher, and beauty shop owner, and Clyde C. Jones, an oil field worker;
[Tommy Lee Jones Biography (1946-)] the two were married and divorced twice. Jones, an eighth-generation Texan of
Welsh descent, had a
Cherokee grandparent.
[Eric O'Keefe :: WD Ranch] He was a resident of
Midland, Texas and attended
Robert E. Lee High School.
Jones graduated from the
St. Mark's School of Texas, where he is now on the board of directors, and attended
Harvard College on a need-based scholarship, staying in Mower B-12 as a freshman, across the hall from future
Vice President Al Gore. As an upperclassman, he was roommates with Gore and
Bob Somerby, who later became editor of the media criticism site the
Daily Howler. Another actor who rose to prominence,
John Lithgow, also lived in
Dunster House. Jones played
offensive guard on Harvard's undefeated 1968
varsity football team, was nominated as a first-team All-
Ivy League selection, and played in the memorable and literal last-minute Harvard sixteen-point comeback to tie Yale in the 1968
Game. Jones graduated
cum laude with a
Bachelor of Arts in
English in 1969.
[Tommy Lee Jones - Trailer - Showtimes - Cast - Movies - New York Times]
Career
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, appropriately playing a Harvard student in
Love Story (
Erich Segal, the author of "Love Story," said that he based the lead character of Oliver on the two undergrad roommates he knew while teaching at Harvard, Jones and 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 1974 production of
Ulysses in Nighttown with
Zero Mostel. In films, he played an escaped convict hunted in
Jackson County Jail (1976), a Vietnam veteran in
Rolling Thunder (1977) and an automobile mogul, co-starring with
Laurence Olivier, in the
Harold Robbins drama
The Betsy.
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.
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 Captain
Bully Hayes.
In 1989, he earned another Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Texas Ranger lawman
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
The Fugitive co-starring
Harrison Ford,
Batman Forever co-starring
Val Kilmer, and
Men in Black with
Will Smith made Jones one of the best-paid and most in-demand actors in
Hollywood. His role in
The Fugitive won wide acclaim and an
Academy Award for
Best Supporting Actor. When he accepted his
Oscar, his head was
shaved for his role in the film
Cobb, a situation he made light of in his speech with: "All a man can say at a time like this is 'I am not really bald.'"
Among his other well-known performances during the 1990s were those as an accused conspirator in the
John F. Kennedy assassination in 1991's
JFK (earning him another Oscar nomination), as a terrorist who hijacks a U.S. Navy battleship in 1992's
Under Siege and as a maximum-security prison warden in way over his head in 1994's
Natural Born Killers.
Jones co-starred with director
Clint Eastwood as astronauts in the 2000 film
Space Cowboys, leading a space rescue mission.
In 2005, the first theatrical feature film Jones directed,
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, was presented at the
2005 Cannes Film Festival. In it, Jones speaks both English and Spanish. It won him the
Best Actor Award. His first film as a director had been in
The Good Old Boys in 1995, a made-for-television movie.
Two strong performances in 2007 marked a resurgence in Jones' 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.
Jones has been a spokesperson for Japanese brewing company
Suntory since 2006. He can be seen in various Japanese TV commercials of Suntory's Coffee brand
Boss as a character called "Alien Jones," an extraterrestrial who takes the form of a human being to check on the world of humans. There are 21 such commercials that can be seen on
YouTube.
Personal life
At the
2000 Democratic National Convention, he presented the nominating speech for his college roommate,
Al Gore, as the
Democratic Party's nominee for
President of the United States.
Jones was married to Kate Lardner, the daughter of
Ring Lardner Jr. from 1971 to 1978. Jones has two children from his second marriage to Kimberlea Cloughley, the daughter of
Phil Hardberger, the mayor of San Antonio: Austin Leonard (born 1982) and Victoria Kafka (born 1991). On March 19, 2001, he married his third wife, Dawn Laurel.
Jones resides in
Terrell Hills, Texas, a town near
San Antonio. He reportedly owns a large ranch in San Saba County, Texas off Chappell Hill Road. He also owns another ranch near
Van Horn, Texas which served as the set for Jones' film
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
Film and television credits
