Tommy Lee Jones

Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946, San Saba, Texas, U.S.) is an American actor best known for his dryly taciturn portrayals of law-enforcement officials, military men, and cowboys.

Jones was the only surviving child born to an oil field labourer and his wife, who worked in law enforcement, education, and cosmetology. When his father accepted a job overseas, Jones remained in the United States, having obtained a football scholarship that allowed him to attend an exclusive Dallas boarding school. There he was drawn to theatre and appeared in student productions. Jones then attended Harvard University, where his roommate was the future U.S. vice president Al Gore. Jones played on the football team, notably participating in the famed 1968 game between Harvard and Yale that ended in a tie, and continued to appear in theatre productions on campus and with repertory companies during the summers. Jones graduated in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in English and, having proved physically unsuited to professional football, decamped to New York City in pursuit of an acting career.

He began appearing in theatre productions in New York and made his film debut in the romantic drama Love Story (1970), adapted from the novel by Erich Segal. He starred as a doctor (1971–75) on the television soap opera One Life to Live and appeared in the 1976 pilot episode of the action comedy series Charlie’s Angels. Having moved to Los Angeles in 1975, Jones continued to find work in television, notably playing film producer Howard Hughes in The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977). He made big-screen appearances in The Betsy (1978), an adaptation of novelist Harold Robbins’s pulpy auto industry melodrama in which he played a race-car driver; Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), a thriller about a fashion photographer who experiences prescient visions of murder in which he featured as the killer; and Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), a biographical film about country singer Loretta Lynn, in which he played her husband.

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Jones earned an Emmy Award, for best actor in a limited series or special, for his portrayal of murderer Gary Gilmore in the 1982 television adaptation of Norman Mailer’s biographical novel The Executioner’s Song. He was also acclaimed for his convincing depiction of a former Texas Ranger in the much-watched television miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989), adapted from Larry McMurtry’s western novel of the same name. Jones then played Clay Shaw, a Louisiana businessman suspected of conspiring to assassinate U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy in JFK (1991); the role earned him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. His turn as a deputy U.S. marshall pursuing a doctor (played by Harrison Ford) wrongfully accused of murder in The Fugitive (1993) earned Jones an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for best supporting actor.

Jones played an ambitious prosecutor in the film adaptation of John Grisham’s legal thriller The Client (1994), a hyperbolically nasty prison warden in Natural Born Killers (1994), and baseball player Ty Cobb in Cobb (1994). Jones deviated from his characteristic flinty inscrutability with his turn as the deranged villain Two-Face in Batman Forever (1995) before playing straight man to Will Smith in the alien comedy Men in Black (1997) and its sequels (2002 and 2012).

He continued to appear on film into the 21st century. He returned to more typical roles as a parole officer in pursuit of a wrongfully convicted murderer (Ashley Judd) in Double Jeopardy (1999) and as a man attempting to find his kidnapped granddaughter in the western The Missing (2003). He then directed and starred in the grim drama The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), which traces the efforts of a rancher to return the body of a friend to Mexico following his accidental shooting. Jones later played a weathered Texas sheriff in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2007) and a father trying to locate his son, an Iraq War veteran, in In the Valley of Elah (2007).

In 2012 Jones again stepped into the shoes of a historical figure, this time as a U.S. congressman, Thaddeus Stevens, in Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s biopic about the titular U.S. president. Jones cowrote, directed, and starred in The Homesman (2014), a western about a pioneer woman (played by Hilary Swank) and a claim jumper (Jones) who must shepherd three mentally unstable women from the Nebraska Territory to Iowa in the late 19th century. He later played a doctor who transfers the consciousness of a dead CIA agent to the brain of a death-row inmate in the thriller Criminal (2016).

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Jones joined the cast of Jason Bourne (2016), an installment of the action franchise starring Matt Damon as the titular rogue agent, as a CIA director. The next year he turned to comedy in Just Getting Started, in which he played an ex-FBI agent who teams up with his rival at a retirement community to save the woman of both their affections from her kidnappers. Jones played a veteran journalist covering the impending invasion of Iraq in Shock and Awe (2017). He later appeared as the missing father of an astronaut (played by Brad Pitt) in the futuristic drama Ad Astra (2019). In 2020 he costarred with Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman in The Comeback Trail, a comedy about an insurance scam.

In addition to acting and directing, Jones owned and helped to operate several cattle and horse ranches.