#all. lothar

[prcspero]

It felt…karmic that he’d lose them and there would be nothing he could do to save them.

@lotharx & @alrikhart & @alessiathepath

[claret-ash]

I don't often share my WIPs to tumblr, but I just had to share my thoughts here! 👀

Faerin would COMPLETELY be the type of friend to tease Anduin over his unusually focused, but soft tone whenever he talks about this mysterious "Wrathion". She's determined to meet this dragon who Anduin seems to have so many stories about... so that she has two future teasing targets! 😈✨

[skymagpie]

I recently read "The Last Guardian" and I am absolutely delighted by it, I feel like when it comes to Khadgar content this is a huge "must read" because the whole book is just so good-natured despite the fact that this sets off a never-ending series of deeply traumatizing events for Khadgar.

Here's some things that canonically happen in this book and that I just found so endearing or fun:

The Kirin Tor literally sends Khadgar off to Medivh because Khadgar kept wandering the halls of the Violet Citadel at night and being so nosy that he caught his professors on drinking binges, sleeping with students or trying to summon demons. Medivh knows that they sent him here hoping he dies because he knows too much.

Khadgar rambling and babbling and being delightfully awkward

Khadgar forgets how to talk when he meets Medivh and makes some strange sound to which Medivh asks Moroes if "the lad is ill."

Medivh having scheduled times for breakfast, lunch and dinner and keeping to them. Also he and Khadgar are just eating porridge with sausages for breakfast every day when he is around.

Khadgar having his inscription set with him that he carries all neatly packaged and tidied up, even though he is this scruffy dirty looking teen boy.

Lothar and Medivh both have this dad relationship with Khadgar, but Lothar is like the cool supportive dad who would take you to a soccer game and would support you at pride with the wrong flag.

During this particularly deep conversation about time and space, Medivh encourages Khadgar to have a bit of wine, Khadgar gets a little tipsy and then Medivh encourages Khadgar to live a little and try to levitate e mug with his magic even though he has been drinking - naturally it ends with Khadgar cleaning the floor afterwards.

When Medivh falls into a coma after their demon encounter at Stormwind, he entrusts Khadgar with handling his mail and Khadgar spends most of his free time sitting next to Medivh's bed and reading him the mail - especially the funny parts.

In the same situation when Medivh wakes up, he sees the startled Khadgar on the floor (after a vision of Sargeras) and softly asks him why he didn't ask Moroes to set up a bed for him there if he wanted to stay in his room.

Khadgar goes very quickly from "Guardian! There is an ORC in the tower!!!" to "Garona is my friend :)"

Khadgar and Garona spend a lot of time rebuilding the library after Garon thrashes the place in order to save Khadgar's life. They make a makeshift woodwork station in the stables outside Karazhan.

Khadgar has like a lowkey puppy crush on Garona and this is actually innocently cute.

Khadgar and Garona on the road when they flee from Medivh is such a nice sequence because they protect each other (from the orcs and humans who would hurt the other one) and also about the fact that they feel betrayed by Medivh. Also Khadgar just wants her to like and trust him 😭

Lothar gets Garona to wear the Stormwind armor by telling her that it matches her eyes and that Khadgar will wear it - and then Khadgar also tells her it matches her eyes and she looks good in it. Lothar using elementary school level tactics to get them to wear the Stormwind armor is so funny.

I just feel like this book was really fun and the pacing of the story was great between building up Medivh as an antagonist who genuinely cared for Khadgar, solving the murder-mystery around him and had the right amount of just daily domestic stuff between Khadgar and him and Khadgar and Garona. Not to mention the excellent parallels between Medivh losing his youth and waking up as an old man and Khadgar losing his youth while also going through what is a very sad coming of age story for him.

[druidonity2]

Since the moment Faerin Lothar was datamined i've seen alot of 'OoHh aNDUIN'S FUTURE WIFE????' and as annoying as that is you know what?? Ill accept it if he takes her last name.

[bruchfest]

dynamic tags

[mariocki]

Funny Games (1997)

"Why are you doing this to us?"

"Why not?"

[warcraftish]

On a scale of 1-10, how much would it hurt Wranduin shippers if Anduin turned up to the Dragon Isles and immediately started putting the moves on Sabellian?

[bossymarmalade]

- Lothar Osterburg, “Shoebox Archive” (2022)

[sneez]

pathologic but it's a lost 1920s german expressionist film [id under cut]

[id:

image 1: a digital drawing of a fake poster, using bright colours and rough, painterly brushstrokes. the title, 'pest' (german for 'plague'), is written at the top in spiky black text. in the foreground a man dressed as a tragedian is staring intently at the viewer, his hands raised and splayed as if in horror. in the background, the town is framed against a red sky, with the polyhedron in yellow behind.

images 2 and 3: fake casting sheets for the film, with the names of the actors and the characters they are playing above a black-and-white portrait photograph of them. all the text is in german. in english it reads: 'Pest', a film by Robert Wiene Alfred Abel as Victor Kain Ernst Busch as Grief Lil Dagover as Katerina Saburova Ernst Deutsch as the Bachelor Carl de Vogt as Vlad the Younger Marlene Dietrich as the Inquisitor Willy Fritsch as Mark Immortell Alexander Granach as Andrey and Peter Stamatin Bernhard Goetzke as General Block Dolly Haas as the Changeling Ludwig Hartau as the Haruspex Brigitte Helm as Anna Angel Brigitte Horney as Maria Kaina Emil Jannings as Big Vlad Gerda Maurus as Yulia Lyuricheva Lothar Menhert as Georgiy Kain Asta Nielsen as Lara Ravel Ossi Oswalda as Eva Yan Fritz Rasp as Stanislas Rubin Conrad Veidt as Alexander Saburov and Tragedian Paul Wegener as Oyun Gertrud Welcker as Aspity

image 4: four digital sketches of set designs for various locations. all are strongly influenced by expressionist imagery, using extreme angles, warped perspective, and dramatic shapes. they are labelled 'street 1' (a street lined with houses), 'street 2' (a square with a lamppost and a set of steps), 'polyhedron exterior' (the polyhedron walkway), and 'cathedral interior' (the dais at the far end of the cathedral).

image 5: four digital drawings in a black-and-white watercolour style, showing fake stills from the film. all are similarly distorted and lit by dramatic lighting. the first shows katerina's bedroom, with katerina standing in the centre of the floor. the second shows the interior of an infected house. the third shows daniil staring out of the frame in horror, one hand on his head and the other raised as if to ward something off. the fourth shows an intertitle with jagged white text reading 'the first day' against a dark background.

end id.]

[vigilskeep]

i feel like i’m being deliberately confusing so i’ll go over the barest of facts as it’s shaping up and pin some names on the background characters

bann lothar trevelyan has five children. his first wife, lady gisela, was a sickly noblewoman from the anderfels who he met when she moved east for her health, and he married her for love despite her family’s history of mages, something the trevelyans historically strictly avoided for centuries (both pious and perhaps desperate to kill rumours of tevinter connections). they had four children:

arthur trevelyan, circle mage necromancer, liar extraordinaire, engaged to josephine montilyet as a kid before found out as a mage, has an adopted daughter from the circle

helena trevelyan, templar, kind of terrible, muscles like you wouldn’t believe, maybe loves you but will only show it 6-12 months after you’re dead

maxwell trevelyan, his class is civilian. family disappointment, kind of useless and very pathetic but in a sort of charming way occasionally, NOT thrilled that his siblings are all insane and the titles ended up with him. the moustache situation is bad

caitriona “cat” trevelyan, circle mage. professional baby of the family which let her get away with way more than it should

when the shock of her mage children eventually killed gisela—or so the story goes, though one might say that she was already weak and probably shouldn’t have been having four children in the first place—bann trevelyan was eventually convinced to remarry. but this was for political gain, a marriage to the lady joan, a much much younger woman from an influential ostwick family. she wanted none of it, and a year or two after her first and only child’s birth, immediately accepted an offer to join the grey wardens. the child was:

beatrice “bea” trevelyan, who grew up quiet, reserved, and kind, but became considerably less reserved after she was lauded the herald of andraste, took up the assassin specialisation, saved the world, and married red jenny herself

lady joan—or ser joan of the grey wardens, as the lady preferred to be called—died with many other grey wardens at the battle of ostagar.

bann trevelyan always regretted her fate, as if his regret after the fact was any good to her. it made him unwilling to push their daughter into an arranged marriage or the chantry life as he was expected to do with his younger children. this made the remaining children from his first marriage deeply anxious, sure his intention was to push them aside and give her their inheritance. (the bann was very distant with all his children, except perhaps his beloved eldest son, thoroughly convincing the rest that he disliked them specifically.)

bea was thus somewhat mistreated by her elder siblings thanks to their anxiety/jealousy, though she would assure you it never got out of hand. she spent the majority of her time simply ignored, in the library or with the trevelyans’ horses, except during the visits of her aunt: a templar named ser adelaide, bann trevelyan’s younger sister who had been passed off to the chantry as she was supposed to be. she saw herself in bea for that reason, and also had never been fond of lady gisela, so bea was her particular favourite and she visited whenever she could

[prcspero]

closed starter for @lotharx location: lostlands note: :angrytiddies:

Tired was the word he would use for how he felt right now after everything that had transpired. Prospero had never really been through a fight quite like that one before, but he had to say that facing down a dragon and speaking with some deities was not on his bucket list. Maybe he should have put those things on there though. That seemed to be the least of their concerns now. He should've been with Alrik and Alessia right now. Instead, he was here looking at this barrier. This wasn't magic he had ever seen himself, but he'd read about it. Seven layers of elemental and spiritual magic formed this prismatic barrier surrounding Iskaldrik. It would take precise movements to even make a dent in it. And he may have been old, but this was not something that one person could do alone.

Nevertheless, he had been on his way back from observing it only to run into his future date. He still wasn't sure if they were actually going to go on that date or if it had been a joke, but he'd keep pretending that it was the former. There was a question lingering in his mind though. "And here I thought you were a normal, stoic soldier with an ax. Little did I know you were sipping colossus juice."

[bookshelfdreams]

Hey I like a lot of the takes you have regarding the pirate show so I wanted to ask for your opinion on smth that's been bothering me for a while:

I have a deep seated dislike for Hamilton. Twinkifying the fucking founding fathers, romanticizing slave abusers and overall villainizing the wrong people while others (Hamilton at the front naturally) gets sung at. Speaking of singing - I really hate it. Shipping (i want to repeat) the founding fathers, the blatant white washing bla bla bla. Anyway those are all known problems and better people have said it smarter before and that isn't really my point

It's the fact that a friend of mine recently brought up that Ofmd pretty much is the same and I shouldn't scream so loud in my glass house. Inaccurate historically speaking, the blatant ignoring of the slave owning that the real Stede and Edward did and so on and so forth. Minus the singing perhaps if we ignore Frenchies and Izzys

So. Does it make me a hypocrite to like ofmd so much but despise the mere mention of Hamilton? It's a thing I'm really stressed about lately and that kind of ruined my joy about finally getting season 2. I would love to hear your opinion. or that of your followers for that matter.

Thank you 😊

oh thank YOU because I do feel that this is an interesting thing to examine and we do not talk about it enough.

I have never seen Hamilton, or listened to the songs (except some snippets). I have never been involved in the fandom. I really, really can't speak to what the musical itself did wrong and right. But I will say this: There was a reason it got as popular and received the critical acclaim that it did. I can't speak to how it addresses the systemic injustice baked into the USA from the very beginning, and I do have a suspicion that it glosses over a lot of uncomfortable truths. But I also feel it is important that we divorce the source material from the fandom it spawns because ultimately, Miranda isn't responsible for Hatsune Miku Binder Jefferson, or the whole hivliving debacle.

Just as David Jenkins isn't responsible for the handwaving of slavery in fanworks, or the great Izzy Hands Debate, or whitewashing in fanart, or shitty, racist headcanons of the characters of colour, or whatever deranged scandal is yet to come to light. This is true for all fandoms; criticizing fandom dynamics is a very different conversation from criticizing the canon.

Let's focus on the canon here, though, because defending the fandom is pointless, and not something I want to do. Curate your experience.

The first thing to say is: If you like ofmd but don't like Hamilton, that's not hypocritical at all, that's first and foremost a matter of taste. Things are good when we like them and bad when we don't. We don't have to find objective reasons for it.

If the fact that the historical Stede Bonnet was a slaveowner, and the historical Blackbeard also participated in the slave trade, are dealbreakers for someone, that's valid. People have every right to be uncomfortable with that. The conversation could end at this point, if we want it to (I don't because I love to hear myself talk).

If we look at the historical figures a little closer the first stark difference is the cultural context in which they exist. The founding fathers seem to be extremely mythologized in the american consciousness but also, are understood to be real historical people. The founding myth is fundamental to the way in which the USA perceives itself (that is, as a beacon of freedom and democracy), and it's pretty hard to reconcile that with the bloodshed and human misery it was founded on. It's uncomfortable; and it's not just an American problem. Every western nation/former colonial power has quite literal corpses in their closets they'd rather not talk about (just so you don't think I'm getting on a high horse about the famed Erinnerungskultur here; go ask a german person about Lothar von Trotha and what he did to the Nama and Herero to receive a blank stare). The difference is, that the founding fathers are too prominent and too important to just not talk about, so instead, they are sanitized to a degree that can be straight up historical revisionism.

That's not Miranda's fault. Nor is it the fault of any one particular piece of historical fiction, biography, documentary, or what have you. But it is the context in which Hamilton exists and, from what I understand, a culture to which it contributes. Especially since it's based on a biography of the real Alexander Hamilton, and (again, to my understanding) claims to tell a more or less accurate story.

Pirates, on the other hand, are perceived completely differently. They are mythologized, but not for ideological reasons, not as state-building propaganda. Pirates are more like folk heroes; cultural icons (near) completely divorced from whatever historical figure once lived. They are "real" in the sense that they are based on real people, but engaging with them, from the start, has a layer of removal from reality that engaging with figures like the founding fathers hasn't. Blackbeard is from a saga. George Washington is from history.

ofmd, specifically, makes clear at every turn that what we are told is a fictional story that has very little to do with any real events. It's openly anachronistic, it has absurd internal logic. Life-threatening injuries are walked off. There's actual magic. Dinghies are treated like spawn points in a video game. Everything, from the costumes to the vernacular to the story beats, tells the audience that none of this is real.

You wouldn't accuse, idk, A Knight's Tale, or Mel Brooks's Men In Tights of whitewashing history. I feel like ofmd plays in a similar league; it's a comedy very vaguely based on history, and it makes sure the audience knows we are not about to be told anything true. If you watch ofmd, you know this isn't about the real, historical Stede Bonnet or Edward Teach.

So. Let's examine the actual story, yes? The story that is told here is anticolonialist, antiracist, and challenges oppressive power structures as much as is possible for a production like this. It addresses these things and condemns them, both explicitly and in its underlying message. (I'm not gonna explain all of this, enough ink has been spilled about it by people smarter than me)

I do not know what Hamilton is about at its core. I know Our Flag Means Death is about authenticity in the face of the whole world telling you there's something wrong with you. It's about resisting dehumanization and reclaiming your personhood. It's about love, in a radical, system-destroying way, about breaking the cycle of abuse, about healing, and finding joy.

Yes, the real historical figures it's based on were all horrible people. Again, if that's a dealbreaker, that's fine. I'm not trying to convince anyone who is deeply uncomfortable with that fact; it's perfectly understandable.

However, for me, personally, the story as a whole is so far removed from reality, and so firm in its message, that I feel this is forgivable.

(Oh, and a lat aside, I also feel like likening ofmd to Hamilton seldom seems to come from a place of genuine criticism. Often it seems to be more along the lines of "Hamilton is cringe, and if I say ofmd=Hamilton ppl will be too embarrassed to defend it" which yk. feels kinda disingenuous to me.)

[the-californicationist]

Hi 🥺( I’m lotharwinchester on ao3)

It says in your ask guidelines that you’re willing to write in a trans prospective? I was wondering if you’d be willing to write a fanfic where soap and/or price goes to pride with their trans masc squad mate because they’ve never been supported enough to go? (Their relationship could be any one, romantic or platonic) I love your writing, like I can always visualize to the t everything you’re describing. 🥰

Lothar!! Omg hiiii ^_^ I am always so stoked to see your comments, friend! I would be honored to write this fic for you. <3 <3 I hope this is what you were imagining. Happy Pride!!

You'll Never Walk Alone

Spotting him in the crowd was surprisingly easy. To be fair, he was huge. His shoulders sprawled high above a pair of lovers, decked out in their rainbow gear, kissing and hugging each other like their lives depended on it, fully dressed in their pride. If there was ever a time to bring out the tacky rainbow merch, it was today. But, John was in all black. 

You didn’t mind. Not everyone had a closet that was prepared for the city’s annual Pride Parade. You were just glad that he could make it. 

No, that was wrong. You were glad that he decided to come. You didn’t need him to be clad in rainbows. Choosing to be here versus just being available to be here were two very different things. His presence meant the world to you. 

All through training, your captain had never treated you with disrespect. He’d learned your name and your pronouns, and you had a suspicion that everyone else on base had been strongly encouraged to learn them as well. When you rendezvous’d with new teams, he reinforced your identity, making sure that the one or two snide remarks or misgenderings that slipped through were cut down without mercy. He was a fearsome ally, and you felt lucky to have him.

You’d transitioned alone. In fact, most of the people who you had called friends in your life had cut you out of theirs before you’d even had a chance to tell them about your true identity. They knew that you had refused to conform to their idea of how you should have dressed, how you should have worn your hair, how you should have behaved, and that had been enough for them to abandon you. Your heart ached to know that their friendship had been conditional. Those people had wanted to make you feel ashamed of yourself, of who you had finally been able to become now that you were out from under their oppressive darkness.

But, you weren’t ashamed. You were determined. You joined up with the RAF, eventually making it through to the SAS, and you promised yourself that if you had to die for your country, you’d not die with your deadname still hanging heavy around your neck.

So, you changed it. Officially. Price had even been there to help you with the paperwork. 

This was your first official pride after coming out, and although crowds tended to make any good soldier a little nervous, you had actually never felt more secure. Wearing your rainbow-strapped backpack with your blue, pink, and white trans pride tee was not how you usually chose to represent yourself in public. To be honest, you usually dressed like Price, dark and covert, but not today. Today, you wanted to be yourself, loudly. 

You caught your captain’s eye and waved him down. Watching the street for scooters or bikes, he jogged over to you, joining you in the back of the parade. 

“Hey, mate. Good to see ya.” His voice was deep and comforting. He shook your hand with genuine warmth, falling into step beside you. 

“You, too. I’m glad you’re here, Cap.” You studied his face, still moved by his support.

“All dressed up? Lookin’ sharp.” Price examined your outfit, getting a good look at your facepaint as well. You’d gotten it done at the start of the parade, and you were sure it had halfway flaked off by now. 

“Thanks. Oh! Almost forgot. Picked up one of these for you, if you want it.” You handed him a pin. It was a simple pride flag button, but the look on his face was full of surprise and gratitude. 

“Nice! Sorry about my lack of rainbows, mate. But, I found this shirt I got for The Reds’ season last year, and I reckoned it’d do.”

Price unzipped his black hoodie and held out his shirt, stretching it for you to see the words. It was the Liverpool Football Club’s merch with their famous song title emblazoned on the front.

“You’ll never walk alone,” you read aloud, looking up at Price for clarification.

“Aye. You’ll never walk alone, either, mate. Promise you that. In fact, the boys should be here any minute.”

He looked down at his watch and then searched through the crowd at the next intersection. You peered into the swarm of flags and glitter and people and saw them there; Soap, Gaz, and Ghost all standing together, craning their necks, searching for you and the captain. 

Gaz had come prepared with a big billowing flag in his hands, Soap had clearly had way more fun at the face painting booth than you did, and Ghost, although dressed in just as much black as Price, wore a trans pride medical mask over his mouth. 

Price let out a shrill whistle, the pitch of which made your blood run cold from its familiarity. All at once, the trio turned toward you, and when they saw your faces, they broke out into smiles, trotting towards you as they folded around the hoard of people. 

Before you knew it, you were surrounded by your team, laughing and joking and dancing together through the street, the music vibrating through your chest, your cheeks burning from your perpetual smile.

Johnny was having the time of his life, somehow charming his way onto a nearby float, waving the flags back and forth like he was leading a charge. Gaz and Ghost were walking in front of you, chatting with the people around you, catching candy being tossed from the crowd.

Price hung back, still keeping step with you. Suddenly, you felt something brush against your wrist. When you looked down, you saw your captain's huge palm swooping under yours to catch it. He took your hand in his, holding it firmly, squeezing it. You looked up at him and smiled, squeezing back.

Where there had once been gray, heavy clouds, now there was only a pale blue sky, and as you felt the sun heat your skin on this chilly June morning, you’d never been more proud to be who you are.

[bruchfest]

tags

[justforbooks]

James Earl Jones

American actor hailed for his many classical roles whose voice became known to millions as that of Darth Vader in Star Wars

During the run of the 2011 revival of Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy in London, with Vanessa Redgrave, the actor James Earl Jones, who has died aged 93, was presented with an honorary Oscar by Ben Kingsley, with a link from the Wyndham’s theatre to the awards ceremony in Hollywood.

Glenn Close in Los Angeles said that Jones represented the “essence of truly great acting” and Kingsley spoke of his imposing physical presence, his 1,000-kilowatt smile, his basso profundo voice and his great stillness. Jones’s voice was known to millions as that of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars film trilogy and Mufasa in the 1994 Disney animation The Lion King, as well as being the signature sound of US TV news (“This is CNN”) for many years.

His status as the leading black actor of his generation was established with the Tony award he won in 1969 for his performance as the boxer Jack Jefferson (a fictional version of Jack Johnson) in Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope on Broadway, a role he repeated in Martin Ritt’s 1970 film, and which earned him an Oscar nomination.

On screen, Jones – as the fictional Douglass Dilman – played the first African-American president, in Joseph Sargent’s 1972 movie The Man, based on an Irving Wallace novel. His stage career was notable for encompassing great roles in the classical repertoire, such as King Lear, Othello, Hickey in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh and Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

He was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, the son of Robert Earl Jones, a minor actor, boxer, butler and chauffeur, and his wife Ruth (nee Connolly), a teacher, and was proud of claiming African and Irish ancestry. His father left home soon after he was born, and he was raised on a farm in Jackson, Michigan, by his maternal grandparents, John and Maggie Connolly. He spoke with a stutter, a problem he dealt with at Brown’s school in Brethren, Michigan, by reading poetry aloud.

On graduating from the University of Michigan, he served as a US Army Ranger in the Korean war. He began working as an actor and stage manager at the Ramsdell theatre in Manistee, Michigan, where he played his first Othello in 1955, an indication perhaps of his early power and presence.

The family had moved from the deep south to Michigan to find work, and now Jones went to New York to join his father in the theatre and to study at the American Theatre Wing with Lee Strasberg. He made his Broadway debut at the Cort theatre in 1958 in Dory Schary’s Sunrise at Campobello, a play about Franklin D Roosevelt.

He was soon a cornerstone of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare festival in Central Park, playing Caliban in The Tempest, Macduff in Macbeth and another Othello in the 1964 season. He also established a foothold in films, as Lt Lothar Zogg in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1963), a cold war satire in which Peter Sellers shone with brilliance in three separate roles.

The Great White Hope came to the Alvin theatre in New York from the Arena Stage in Washington, where Jones first unleashed his shattering, shaven-headed performance – he was described as chuckling like thunder, beating his chest and rolling his eyes – in a production by Edwin Sherin that exposed racism in the fight game at the very time of Muhammad Ali’s suspension from the ring on the grounds of his refusal to sign up for military service in the Vietnam war.

Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs (1970) was a response to Jean Genet’s The Blacks, in which Jones, who remained much more of an off-Broadway fixture than a Broadway star in this period, despite his eminence, played a westernised urban African man returning to his village for his father’s funeral. With Papp’s Public theatre, he featured in an all-black version of The Cherry Orchard in 1972, following with John Steinbeck’s Lennie in Of Mice and Men on Broadway and returning to Central Park as a stately King Lear in 1974.

When he played Paul Robeson on Broadway in the 1977-78 season, there was a kerfuffle over alleged misrepresentations in Robeson’s life, but Jones was supported in a letter to the newspapers signed by Edward Albee, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman and Richard Rodgers. He played his final Othello on Broadway in 1982, partnered by Christopher Plummer as Iago, and appeared in the same year in Master Harold and the Boys by Athol Fugard, a white South African playwright he often championed in New York.

In August Wilson’s Fences (1987), part of that writer’s cycle of the century “black experience” plays, he was described as an erupting volcano as a Pittsburgh garbage collector who had lost his dreams of a football career and was too old to play once the major leagues admitted black players. His character, Troy Maxson, is a classic of the modern repertoire, confined in a world of 1950s racism, and has since been played by Denzel Washington and Lenny Henry.

Jones’s film career was solid if not spectacular. Playing Sheikh Abdul, he joined a roll call of British comedy stars – Terry-Thomas, Irene Handl, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan and Peter Ustinov – in Marty Feldman’s The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977), in stark contrast to his (at first uncredited) Malcolm X in Ali’s own biopic, The Greatest (1977), with a screenplay by Ring Lardner. He also appeared in Peter Masterson’s Convicts (1991), a civil war drama; Jon Amiel’s Sommersby (1993), with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster; and Darrell Roodt’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1995), scripted by Ronald Harwood, in which he played a black South African pastor in conflict with his white landowning neighbour in the 40s.

In all these performances, Jones quietly carried his nation’s history on his shoulders. On stage, this sense could irradiate a performance such as that in his partnership with Leslie Uggams in the 2005 Broadway revival at the Cort of Ernest Thompson’s elegiac On Golden Pond; he and Uggams reinvented the film performances of Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn as an old couple in a Maine summer house.

He brought his Broadway Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to London in 2009, playing an electrifying scene with Adrian Lester as his broken sports star son, Brick, at the Novello theatre. The coarse, cancer-ridden big plantation owner was transformed into a rumbling, bear-like figure with a totally unexpected streak of benignity perhaps not entirely suited to the character. But that old voice still rolled through the stalls like a mellow mist, rich as molasses.

That benign streak paid off handsomely, though, in the London reprise of a deeply sentimental Broadway comedy (and Hollywood movie), Driving Miss Daisy, in which his partnership as a chauffeur to Redgrave (unlikely casting as a wealthy southern US Jewish widow, though she got the scantiness down to a tee) was a delightful two-step around the evolving issues of racial tension between 1948 and 1973.

So deep was this bond with Redgrave that he returned to London for a third time in 2013 to play Benedick to her Beatrice in Mark Rylance’s controversial Old Vic production of Much Ado About Nothing, the middle-aged banter of the romantically at-odds couple transformed into wistful, nostalgia for seniors.

His last appearance on Broadway was in a 2015 revival of DL Coburn’s The Gin Game, opposite Cicely Tyson. He was given a lifetime achievement Tony award in 2017, and the Cort theatre was renamed the James Earl Jones theatre in 2022.

Jones’s first marriage, to Julienne Marie (1968-72), ended in divorce. In 1982 he married Cecilia Hart with whom he had a son, Flynn. She died in 2016. He is survived by Flynn, also an actor, and a brother, Matthew.

🔔 James Earl Jones, actor, born 17 January 1931; died 9 September 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?