Introduction to Tommy Lee Jones:
American actor Tommy Lee Jones was born on September 15, 1946, in San Saba, Texas. He is renowned for portraying cowboys, police officers, and members of the armed forces with poise and gravity.
Tommy Lee Jones was his parents’ only surviving child. While his mother worked in law enforcement, education, and cosmetology, his father was an oil field laborer. Jones was able to attend a prestigious boarding school in Dallas thanks to a football scholarship, so he stayed in the country when his father obtained a job abroad. He became interested in theater there and participated in school performances. Al Gore, the future vice president of the United States, shared a room with him while he was a student at Harvard University.
Early Life and Education:
Tommy Lee Jones spent his summers performing in repertory and campus theater productions and was a member of the football team, most notably in the historic 1968 Harvard–Yale game that ended in a tie. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English in 1969, he relocated to New York City to pursue an acting career after it was determined that he was physically unsuitable to play professional football.
Tommy Lee Jones started performing in plays in New York before making his screen debut in the romantic drama Love Story (1970), which was based on Eric Segal’s book. He later participated in the 1976 pilot episode of the action-comedy series Charlie’s Angels and played a doctor in the television soap opera One Life to Live (1971–75). Jones continued to work in television after relocating to Los Angeles in 1975. He most famously played director Howard Hughes in The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977).
The Betsy (1978), an adaptation of Harold Robbins’s auto-industry melodrama in which he played a race-car driver; Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), a thriller about a fashion photographer with visions of future murders, in which Jones played the killer; and Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), a biopic of country singer Loretta Lynn, in which he played her husband, were among his early film roles.
For his role as murderer Gary Gilmore in the 1982 television production of Norman Mailer’s biographical novel The Executioner’s Song, Jones won an Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Limited Series or Special. His strong performance as a retired Texas Ranger in the wildly successful miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989), which was based on Larry McMurtry’s Western novel of the same name, also won him significant acclaim.
After that, he gave a noteworthy performance in JFK (1991) as Clay Shaw, a Louisiana businessman suspected of plotting President John F. Kennedy’s murder. For this portrayal, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. For his performance as a deputy U.S. marshal pursuing a doctor (played by Harrison Ford) in The Fugitive (1993), Jones went on to win both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor.
Tommy Lee Jones portrayed a variety of characters during the mid-1990s, including the renowned baseball player Ty Cobb in Cobb (1994), a ruthlessly corrupt prison warden in Natural Born Killers (1994), and an ambitious prosecutor in the film adaptation of John Grisham’s legal thriller The Client (1994). In Batman Forever (1995), he played the quirky villain Two-Face, deviating from his typical tough, reserved image. In the science fiction comedy Men in Black (1997) and its sequels in 2002 and 2012, he played the straight-laced agent alongside Will Smith.
Tommy Lee Jones continued to work on movies long into the twenty-first century. As a parole officer hunting a wrongfully convicted murderer (played by Ashley Judd) in Double Jeopardy (1999) and as a man looking for his abducted granddaughter in the Western The Missing (2003), he returned to more familiar territory.
After that, he directed and featured in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), a somber film about a rancher’s struggle to return his friend’s body to Mexico following an unintentional gunshot. Later, in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2007), he played an experienced Texas sheriff; in In the Valley of Elah (2007), he played a father looking for his son, an Iraq War veteran.
In Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln, which was based on the life of the American president, Jones played Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, another historical person. The Homesman (2014), a Western about a pioneer woman (played by Hilary Swank) and a claim jumper (Jones) entrusted with transporting three mentally ill ladies from the Nebraska Territory to Iowa in the late 19th century, features him as co-writer, director, and actor. Later, in the thriller Criminal (2016), he portrayed a doctor who gives a death row convict the consciousness of a murdered CIA agent.
Jones played a CIA director in Jason Bourne (2016), a continuation of the action series that starred Matt Damon as the renegade agent. He played a former FBI agent who partners up with his competitor in a retirement home to save the woman they both admire from kidnappers in the comedy Just Getting Started the following year. In Shock and Awe (2017), he also portrayed an experienced journalist chronicling the Iraq War’s prelude.
He later made an appearance in the future drama Ad Astra (2019) as the lost father of an astronaut (played by Brad Pitt). Jones costarred with Morgan Freeman and Robert De Niro in the comedy The Comeback Trail (2020), which was about an insurance scam. In addition to directing and acting, Jones has owned and assisted in running a number of horse and cattle ranches, demonstrating his strong affinity for ranch life.