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Tommy Lee Jones
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This article is about the American film actor Tommy Lee Jones. For other uses, see
Tommy.
Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946) is an Oscar-winning American actor and director.
Contents
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 Early life
- 1.2 Graduation
- 1.3 Career
- 1.4 Private life
- 2 Filmography
- 3 References
- 3.1 Footnotes
- 3.2 External links
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Biography
Early life
Jones was born in San Saba, Texas to Clyde C. Jones, who worked in the oil fields of both Texas and Libya, and Lucille Marie Scott, who was a police officer and hairdresser who owned a beauty parlour; the two were married and divorced twice. Jones, an eighth-generation Texan, has a Cherokee Native American grandparent, and is mostly of Welsh ancestry. Jones was also a resident of Midland, Texas, and attended the same high school as the First Lady Laura Bush.
Graduation
Jones graduated the
St. Mark's School of Texas (where he is now on the board of directors) and attended
Harvard on a scholarship, where he lived 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
John Lithgow in
Dunster House. Jones played
offensive tackle 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
blitz to tie Yale in the 1968
Game. Jones graduated
cum laude with a degree in English in
1969.
Career
Jones then moved to New York City to become an actor. He started acting on Broadway and in television. He made his debut in movies in Love Story, in 1970 (Erich Segal, the author of "Love Story" has said that he based the lead character of Oliver on the two undergrad roommates he knew while teaching at Harvard, Jones and Al Gore. Gore brought this up during the 2000 Presidential campaign). Between 1971 and 1975, he portrayed Dr. Mark Toland on the ABC soap opera, One Life to Live, and then he played the role of an escaped convict who was hunted down by the police in Jackson County Jail (1976).
In 1978 he starred opposite Sir Laurence Olivier in The Betsy.
In 1981, he played a drifter opposite Sally Field in Back Roads, a comedy that received middling reviews and grossed $11 million at the box office.[1]
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. In the same year he also starred in pirate adventure
Nate and Hayes, playing the heavily bearded
Captain Bully Hayes. Despite being a film that was largely forgotten due to the unspectacular title, interest has recently been rekindled thanks to the
Pirates of the Caribbean films.
[dubious — see talk page]
In the 1990s, movies such as
The Fugitive co-starring
Harrison Ford,
Batman Forever co-starring
Val Kilmer, and
Men in Black with
Will Smith brought him tens of millions of dollars and made him one of the top actors of
Hollywood. His role in
The Fugitive won him 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 by saying "All a man can say at a time like this is 'I am not really bald.'"
In 2005, he released his first feature-film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, that was presented at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. It won him the Best Actor Award. His first film as director was in 1995, a made-for-television movie. For many of his movies he utilized Duc Truong, a lookalike stunt double.
Private life
At the 2000 Democratic National Convention he nominated his college roommate, Al Gore, as the Democratic party's nominee for President of the United States.
Jones has two children from his second marriage to Kimberlea Cloughey: Victoria Kafka (born 1991) and Austin Leonard (born 1982). He was married to Kate Lardner, the daughter of Ring Lardner Jr. from 1971 to 1978. On March 19, 2001, he married his third wife, Dawn Laurel.
Jones resides in Terrell Hills, Texas, a community in San Antonio.
Filmography
References
Footnotes
