In honor of James Earl Jones, who just died at age ninety-three, we’re all calling up memories of our favorite Jones performances. These memories probably involve his magnificently deep, rumbling voice.

As Darth Vader in Star Wars (1977) he unforgettably intoned to a subordinate officer who doubts the power of the Force, “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” That’s right before the throat-crushing begins.

In The Lion King (1994), millions of children were marked for life by the magisterial spirit of Mufasa urging from beyond the grave, “Simba, you must remember who you are — you are my son, the one true king.” And Conan the Barbarian (1982) features Jones’s remarkably unsettling grin as he delivers the “Steel isn’t strong, boy” speech to the bloodied but unbowed title character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Oddly enough, the James Earl Jones line that most lingers in my memory is spoken in exhaustion, in the dwindling of physical power that nevertheless packs a tremendous dramatic punch because of its utter despair. It’s the last line in his first starring role in a film, The Great White Hope (1970).

In it, Jones reprised his Tony-winning stage performance as Jack Johnson (called Jack Jefferson in the play and the film), the legendary heavyweight boxer who became the first black world champion, undefeated for many years in spite of all the racist world could throw at him in the form of Caucasian opponents who were supposed to defeat him in the ring, one “great white hope” after another.

At the end of the play and film, he finally loses the fight, a tragic nadir that follows the suicide of his white wife. As he’s being supported away from the ring following the brutal bout, the crowd surges past him, and he says, “Let ’em go by. Let ’em all go by.”  At least, that’s my memory of the last harrowing scene, which I saw on television when I was a teenager. I can’t stand to revisit it, on account of the pain.

That voice, that glorious basso profundo that did so much to define Jones’s career, is central to his extraordinary biography in various ways. As a small boy, he lost that voice entirely, developing a terrible stutter as a result of the trauma of his hardscrabble childhood in a broken family. His father, Robert Earl Jones, was a Mississippi sharecropper and an aspiring boxer and actor who deserted his family to pursue his dreams. His mother got a divorce and left her son to be raised by his maternal grandparents in rural Michigan. For years, Jones hardly spoke, allowing himself to be regarded as essentially mute, until a teacher urged him to read aloud in class a striking poem he’d written, and he discovered he could recite memorized lines without stuttering. There’s a haunting poetic logic to the entire account of his salvation through acting.

His harsh family legacy was nevertheless impressive in its way. His father, who looked very much like James Earl Jones, found a notable amount of success in his life. As a boxer, he was good enough to become Joe Louis’s sparring partner. And his progress as an actor was also impressive. It included working on productions with the Works Progress Administration and appearing in the 1938 Langston Hughes play Don’t You Want to Be Free?, as well as in films by pioneering black director-producer Oscar Micheaux. His career was curtailed when he was blacklisted in the 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee because of his involvement with left-wing groups.

If you’ve seen the film The Sting (1973), starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, you’ve seen the moving performance of Robert Earl Jones in the opening sequence. Playing Luther Coleman, he’s partnering with Redford’s cheerful renegade character, Johnny Hooker, in running small cons and gets brutally murdered in retaliation by the goons of an Irish American mob boss.

There’s a poignant moment in which Coleman admits to Hooker that all his tales about having once been involved in major moneymaking long cons back in the day weren’t true, because nobody was going to let an impoverished black man in on any such deals. Once again, I can’t go back to verify the exact line — too painful.

Later in life, father and son reconciled and worked together on stage. But Robert Earl Jones never had the sheer vocal or physical power that defined his son’s career. The size and scope of James Earl Jones’s voice helped make him an extraordinary stage actor and a natural in Shakespearian roles, but his tall, barrel-chested build and imposing looks also made him a striking figure as an actor in any medium. The expressively dark eyebrows, the thousand-yard stare, the short emphatic nose, and heavy jawline all contributed to the impression of formidable strength in every role he played.

Even his characters’ flaws seemed strong, as you can see in a film like Claudine (1974), in which he plays, with extraordinary brio, a garbageman trying to win over the children of the woman he loves (Diahann Carroll), who works as a housekeeper and is reliant on welfare to support them. He’s temporarily crushed when it’s revealed he’s underpaying on child-support for his own kids from two previous marriages.

If the roles Jones played in films seldom lived up in depth or richness to his manifest brilliance, there were compensations. He had a contagiously delightful, egalitarian, old-school appreciation for participating in popular entertainment. The money was excellent, of course, and the love of millions of Star Wars, Conan the Barbarian, The Lion King, and Field of Dreams fans was heartwarming. For high-culture creative expression, he was always welcome back in the theater to star in The Iceman Cometh, Fences or King Lear, or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Still, we must be grateful for the gifts that allowed Jones to pull off that scene in Matewan (1987) when his character, a laborer nicknamed “Few Clothes” Johnson who’s come to West Virginia looking for work, confronts the angry white racists gathered at the union meeting where one calls him a scab. Though his eyes have just been darting back and forth as he measures the grave danger he’s in, nevertheless he retorts instantly, “You watch your mouth, peckerwood.”

And you believe this man would risk his life saying it, too. That’s talent.