Synopsis
Born
on September 15, 1946, in San Saba, Texas, Tommy Lee Jones spent all
four of his years at Harvard as Al Gore's roommate. Upon graduation, he
moved to New York and then to Hollywood, where his career trajectory
changed dramatically. With 1993's The Fugitive Jones became a household
name, and he followed that role with memorable roles in Men in Black
and.
Early Life
An
actor, director, screenwriter, Tommy Lee Jones was born September 15,
1946, in San Saba, Texas. An eighth-generation Texan, Jones was the only
child of Clyde Jones, a cowboy-turned-oil-field worker, and his wife,
Lucille Marie. His parents were married and divorced twice; as he later
revealed in interviews, Jones had a difficult adolescence, enduring a
good deal of physical abuse at the hands of his father. When Tommy Lee
was a teenager, Clyde Jones took a job in the oil fields of North
Africa. His son worked hard to win a scholarship to St. Mark's, an elite
Dallas prep school, so that he could stay in the country.
A
talented athlete and student, Jones eventually won a football
scholarship to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His
roommate for all four years at Harvard was Al Gore, a future United
States senator, vice president, and presidential candidate. Jones, an
English literature major, became an all-Ivy offensive guard on the
football team. He also loved drama and performed in a number of school
productions, most notably playing the lead in Shakespeare's Coriolanus.
Pursuing Acting
With
too slight a frame to make it in the National Football League (NFL),
Jones headed to New York to pursue a career as an actor upon his
graduation from Harvard in 1969. He won his first professional role
shortly thereafter, in an off-Broadway production. In addition to his
stage work, Jones had a regular role as Dr. Mark Toland on the ABC
daytime soap opera One Life to Live from 1971 to 1975. He made his feature film debut in 1970 as the roommate of Ryan O'Neal's character in the weepy Love Story.
Frustrated
with the dwindling opportunities on Broadway, Jones moved to Hollywood
in 1975. He soon landed a prominent role in the debut of the popular
television series Charlie's Angels as well as his first lead role in a Hollywood feature, the 1976 crime drama Jackson County Jail, produced by edgy B-movie icon Roger Corman. (Jones' first-ever big screen lead was in the little-seen 1970 Canadian film Eliza's Horoscope.)
Over
the next two decades, Jones appeared in nearly three dozen film and
television projects and turned in a number of critically acclaimed
performances. Highlights of his pre-Fugitive career included well received TV movies such as The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), The Executioner's Song (1982) - for which he won an Emmy Award - and the celebrated CBS miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989), costarring Robert Duvall, Anjelica Huston, and Diane Lane, among others. He also earned kudos for his supporting performances in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), costarring Sissy Spacek, and Oliver Stone's JFK
(1991), starring Kevin Costner. For the latter film, Jones earned an
Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of
Clay Shaw, a homosexual Dallas businessman and suspected conspirator in
the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Big Break
If Jones' manic performance as a villainous ex-CIA operative in the 1992 thriller Under Siege—starring
Steven Seagal and directed by Andrew Davis—introduced his talents to a
far wider audience than he had previously known, Davis' action-thriller The Fugitive
(1993) catapulted Jones onto the A-list of Hollywood stars. The film,
based on the hit 1960s television series, starred Harrison Ford as a
doctor who is wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and escapes from
jail determined to find her true killer. In addition to garnering
critical acclaim, the film became one of the top-grossing hits of all
time, earning a total of over $170 million. As the hard-edged but
ultimately sympathetic U.S. marshal who pursues the escaped Ford, Jones
turned in a brilliant performance, virtually stealing the film from his
more famous costar and winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
Within the next year, Jones starred in three more huge box-office hits—Stone's Natural Born Killers, The Client, and Blown Away—as well as several less successful features, including Stone's Vietnam drama Heaven and Earth, Blue Sky,
costarring Jessica Lange, and Cobb, in which he played the brutal,
unsympathetic baseball legend Ty Cobb. In 1995, he starred as the
cartoonish villain Two-Face alongside Val Kilmer and Jim Carrey in the
critically drubbed but commercially successful Batman Forever.
Jones' next box-office triumph was the 1997 science fiction action-comedy Men In Black,
a summer blockbuster costarring Will Smith. Jones and Smith displayed
their considerable comedic talents as a pair of U.S. immigration agents
fighting an alien invasion. While his next several projects—Volcano (1997), the animated Small Soldiers (1998), and a Fugitive sequel, U.S. Marshals
(1998)—were relative disappointments both critically and commercially,
Jones scored another huge hit with the 1999 action-thriller Double Jeopardy, costarring Ashley Judd.
Mainstream Success
In
2000, Jones again had success at the box office as a lawyer fighting to
defend a marine colonel, played by Samuel L. Jackson, in the courtroom
drama Rules of Engagement. Later that year, he starred
alongside fellow Hollywood veterans Clint Eastwood, James Garner, and
Donald Sutherland in the well received Space Cowboys, about a team of four ex-astronauts called upon to fly one more big mission.
Jones roared back into prominence in 2007, playing Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country For Old Men, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. He also was nominated for Best Actor for his performance as Hank Deerfield in In the Valley of Elah.
In
September, 2008, Jones filed a suit against Paramount Pictures,
claiming the studio owned him more than $10 million in promised
"box-office bonuses" other back-end compensation for his work in No Country for Old Men.
Personal Life
A
championship polo player and dedicated horseman, Jones owns a 3,000
acre ranch in his birthplace of San Saba, 150 miles from San Antonio. He
has been married twice—to Katherine Lardner, an actress and writer whom
he married in the early 1970s and divorced after seven years; and to
Kimberlea Cloughley, whom he met on the Texas set of Back Roads
(1981). He and Cloughley married in 1981 and had two children, Austin
and Victoria, before their divorce in 1996. In March 2001, Jones married
his longtime girlfriend, photographer Dawn Laurel. The couple met on
the set of the 1995 TV movie The Good Old Boys, which Jones directed.
source:biography.com
No comments:
Post a Comment