Robert Earl Jones

Robert Earl Jones was an American actor whose career reached back to the Harlem Renaissance, and he was among the earliest black film stars. Born in northwestern Mississippi in 1910, he took up theater after moving to Chicago during the Great Migration, and by the 1930s Langston Hughes had cast him in the 1938 play Don't You Want to Be Free? His screen work began with the detective lead in Lying Lips, a 1939 race film, and he went on to appear mostly in crime movies and dramas, among them One Potato, Two Potato (1964) and Wild River (1960). He played the aging grifter Luther Coleman in The Sting (1973) and took supporting roles in Sleepaway Camp and Trading Places (both 1983) and Witness (1985). He portrayed Creon in The Gospel at Colonus (1988), appeared in Mule Bone on Broadway in 1991, and received a lifetime achievement award from the U.S. National Black Theatre Festival. He died in 2006.