Darth Vader was played by David Prowse and voiced by James Earl Jones, who gave the famous villain his signature sound. Photo / Getty Images
Darth Vader was played by David Prowse and voiced by James Earl Jones, who gave the famous villain his signature sound. Photo / Getty Images
THREE KEY FACTS
James Earl Jones, who died this week age 93, voiced famous film villain Darth Vader in the first instalments of the Star Wars franchise, a role that was originally uncredited after the actor had requested that his name be omitted because he was “just a special effect”.
In 2022 he agreed to his voice being “cloned” by an AI company so it could be used in the Disney prequel series Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The digital recreation of actors’ voices is a fraught issue one – especially when the original performer has passed.
In 1976, George Lucas was a filmmaker in search of a voice.
He’d just returned to Hollywood from Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, where the fledgling director had worked miracles shooting a rickety space opera on a minuscule budget.
But while the filming of Star Wars had gone as smoothly as could be expected, Lucas had concerns about the project’s mega-villain, Darth Vader – particularly the yeasty Bristol accent that had led co-star Carrie Fisher to dub the character “Darth Farmer”.
Farmer/Vader was played by 6ft 6in (1.98m) former strongman David Prowse, who thought his voice would be included in the final cut.
Lucas, however, knew a rustic Darth Lord of the Sith wouldn’t cut it and decided Prowse’s rural burr was for the snip. But who could he hire to overdub Darth Vader’s menacing monologues?
With time running out – the release date of Star Wars had already been pushed back from Christmas 1976 to May 1977 – he had narrowed his options to two. One was a Hollywood icon whose rich, languid voice was familiar to millions.
The other was a Michigan farm boy who had experienced a childhood stutter so severe he gave up speaking altogether for several years.
The actor, who died at age 93, imbued in the fallen Jedi Knight a wonderfully pantomime quality. He was a baddie you wanted to boo but whom you could never quite bring yourself to hate.
Yet Jones almost missed out on the job entirely, with Lucas seriously considering hiring Citizen Kane director Orson Wells instead – all while Prowse, back in London, thought he was going to be both the vocal and physical embodiment of Vader.
Prowse, Welles, Jones – this bizarre dub triangle understandably gave Lucas a Death Star-sized headache.
Prowse would never have worked, and his exclusion led to a breakdown in his relationship with his director that, decades later, resulted in Lucas barring him from official Star Wars fan events.
Lucas was, however, genuinely torn between Welles and Earl-Jones.
The idea of a movie-making icon such as Welles slipping into a recording booth to blather on about “The Force” and “Rebel Spies” might seem absurd today.
What next? – Stanley Kubrick playing a Cylon in Battlestar: Galactica? Richard Attenborough … Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?
But in the 1970s, Welles’s glory days were a long way behind and he was living from pay-cheque to pay-cheque in the hope of financing his passion project, The Other Side of The Wind (posthumously released by Netflix in 2018).
James Earl Jones voiced the iconic Disney character Mufasa in The Lion King. Photo / File
At this point, he was taking any job going. He was the voice of Paul Masson California Wine, Findus Frozen Peas, and the Cadillac Eldorado. He wasn’t above science fiction either, and in 1986, would play the planet-sized robot Unicron in the original animated Transformers movie.
In other words, he was available. Lucas reached out, and, according to Jones, the two directors met and discussed Darth Vader.
Nobody knows how that summit went, but Lucas later suggested that the gig was Jones’s to lose.
“I knew the voice had to be very, very special,” Lucas said at an event honouring Jones’s contribution to acting. “It was really a choice between Orson Welles and James Earl Jones. James Earl Jones won hands down.”
Jones later suggested that Lucas wanted a voice that sounded ‘darker” than Welles’ plummy tones. So they “hired a guy born in Mississippi, raised in Michigan, and stutters”. The fact that Jones was willing to do the job for just US$7000 ($11,200) - may also have been a factor – it’s difficult to imagine a hard-up grandee such as Welles working for such a sum.
Darth Vader was played by David Prowse and voiced by James Earl Jones, who gave the famous villain his signature sound. Photo / Getty Images
James Earl Jones approached Darth Vader as simply another gig – if even that. He requested that his name be omitted from the Star Wars credits because he was “just a special effect”.
Little could he have guessed that Vader would follow him throughout his career.
It would do so even after he had retired. Jones last voiced Vader in a cameo in The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. But while he was done with Darth Vader, Star Wars was not finished with him, and in 2022, he agreed to allow his voice to be “cloned” by a Ukrainian AI company so that it could be used in the Disney prequel series Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The process of breathing digital life into Jones’s voice proved unexpectedly fraught – not least because Russia invaded Ukraine late in production, and the developers found themselves fine-tuning Darth Vader as missiles thundered overhead.
Fortunately, they got the project over the line with Jones helping as a consultant – a sort of “benevolent godfather,” according to supervising sound editor Matthew Wood. He wasn’t the first Star Wars actor to be digitally recreated by Disney. The same Ukrainian developer had used AI to recreate the voice of a young Luke Skywalker for The Mandalorian.
But while “AI” Darth Vader had the actor’s blessing, the issue of digital recreation of actors’ voices is still a fraught one – especially when the original performer has passed.
There were misgivings over the “cameo” by the late Ian Holm in the new Alien: Romulus sequel (Ridley Scott, who directed Holm in the original Alien, said the actor would have been delighted to return to the franchise). Most notorious was the appearance in the 2016 Star Wars spin-off Rogue One, a digital likeness of Moff Tarkin actor Peter Cushing, who died in 1994 when computers were still coming out of the Stone Age.
Cushing’s estate consented to his appearance in Rogue One. But the use of his image is now the subject of legal action. Disney is being sued by Tyburn Film Productions, a London-based film company that says it signed a contract with the actor, giving it a veto over the creation of his image using special effects. Disney contends it has the right to use Cushing’s image from the original 1977 movie.
The case is to go to court, and the judgement will have implications for the use of the CGI likeness of dead actors. However, this will not have much impact on the future appearance of Darth Vader.
Jones was happy to have his voice conjured by AI and was always appreciative of Star Wars and its fan-base – and more than willing to recite such iconic Vader-isms as “No, I am your father”.
He has now left us, but Darth Vader will remain a beloved villain for decades to come.
