James Earl Jones was never just one thing

James Earl Jones would say that for many years when asked about his role in Star Warsthat he recorded his original performance as Darth Vader in just a few hours. The voice is so ingrained in our culture that it’s almost comical to imagine how little time it took to do it. But it took just a few hours. It was about, as Jones would say, limiting himself to a certain margin of expression. Too A lotand Darth Vader would be too humanized. Too smalland viewers would forget that this man was actually a man, once—and miss the tragedy of the arc that George Lucas would spend decades developing, the path that took Vader from a scared, vulnerable boy to an invincible intergalactic terror. Thanks to Jones, it was all there from the start.

When I was a child watching this film for the first time, I knew I would be surprised by the mismatch between the thunderous voice and the meekness and (which is especially important) white the man who Darth Vader ultimately revealed himself to be once his helmet was off. Jones’s voice matched the man in the mask: varnished, expressionless, disembodied, unflappable. It matched Darth Vader’s vision of power—not the little man inside, but the grand projection that little man needed us to believe he was. It matched Jones himself: a towering figure, with a voice built to echo through the opera houses of our minds, but also a deeply flawed, fiery, mischievous man with a varied and wide-ranging career, even if the popular imagination didn’t always seem to know it.

Jones’ death yesterday at the age of 93 ends a career that seemingly knew no bounds — more than 100 screen appearances is an extraordinary feat for any actor, but an exceptionally rare feat for a black actor whose career began on stage in the 1950s and on screen in the 1960s with a small but memorable plot twist in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BombWhen he landed his breakthrough role in Hollywood, playing a Jack Johnson-inspired boxer in The Great White Hope (1970), Jones had already won a Tony Award for playing the same role on Broadway.

But for many of us, Jones was more than anything else a voice. That was no small feat for a man who often said he lost his speech as a child, when his grandparents took him from Mississippi to Michigan; he only started talking after a high school teacher encouraged him to read some of his own poetry to the class. He had a hard time enunciating, yet he became perhaps the most recognizable voice in the world. It was his booming bass, the one many people heard when dialing 411; the voice announcing CNN and advertising Verizon and Sprint (“Totes Mcgotes!”); the voice urging people to check the Yellow Pages.

It’s hard to remember that he was anything more than a voice. Last night I rewatched the 1974 film. Claudinewhich stands out among Jones’s screen roles, reminding us that he was not simply a noble patriarch, as Sandbox AND Field of dreamsor a trusted authority figure, as in his brief stint as a detective in the TV series Paris. For a time, Jones seemed to flirt with becoming a sex symbol, playing a role that now, given his image, seems extraordinary. In Claudineplayed the role of Rupert “Roop” Marshall, a sexy garbage man with whom Diahann Carroll, in the title role of a working mother with six children struggling to make ends meet, can’t help but fall in love. This is a bit to her detriment, but also very pleasant for her, which is where the film clearly stops: long scenes of Claudine and Roop in bed, smoking after sex, talking while sex, so much of their lives are played out in the cramped confines of his Harlem bedroom, the escape from the even cramped confines of Claudine’s crowded, noisy apartment. Jones seduces us as much as he seduces her, with that glint of mischief in his eye, that quivering excitement coursing through his body, a sexual promiscuity and candor that—to make a claim that’s made all too often these days but is true in this case—is rarely seen in romantic comedies these days.

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What makes Claudine worth watching 50 years later is the way Jones’s seductiveness is given room to develop. Our stance on his character may change as Claudine’s problems with social services and Roop’s concerns about black fatherhood and his value as a breadwinner—in other words, the reality of it—overshadow their romance. It’s no exaggeration to say that, later in Jones’s career, he solidified himself as something of a national paternal figure, a presence we could all, despite our wide range of perspectives and differences, lean into and share. Claudinewith his suffering perspicacity, he seems to foresee it; I am not your fathersays his performance.

Jones was sometimes lumped in with the Sidney Poitiers and Harry Belafontes of Black Hollywood, because he was a crossover star in the 1960s and 1970s. He was known for his ability to appeal to both black and white audiences, not only commercially but also as measured by industry success metrics: Tonys and Emmys (Jones had many), career endurance, and the like. It is equally true that we have demanded from our leading minority stars, particularly in the Jones era, a sense of duty that we expect from almost no one else. Performers can never easily straddle the line between the truth of their own identity and the needs of the larger culture. Poitier has been criticized over the years precisely for his appeal to white American audiences, whether he deliberately courted it or not.

Jones, whose career peaked a bit later and at a less desperate point in history than Poitier’s, fared slightly better. Watching him in Claudineor revisiting his Tony Award-winning stage performance Fencesthe audience couldn’t miss who he was or what his body meant—those long limbs and bright expressions, his barrel chest. He was a titan, given the career he deserved—a career bigger and broader than most actors. And to his credit, even that wasn’t big enough.