Tommy Lee Jones Bio

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Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946) is an American actor and director.

His film roles include federal marshal Samuel Gerard in The Fugitive and U.S. Marshals, the villain Two-Face in Batman Forever, the mysterious Agent K in the Men in Black films, and Western peace officers Woodrow F. Call in Lonesome Dove and Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men. Jones has also portrayed real-life figures such as billionaire Howard Hughes, executed murderer Gary Gilmore and baseball great Ty Cobb.

Tommy Lee Jones: Early life

Jones was born in San Saba, Texas, the son of Lucille Marie (née Scott), a police officer, school teacher, and beauty shop owner, and Clyde C. Jones, an oil field worker; the two were married and divorced twice. Jones, an eighth-generation Texan of Welsh descent, has a Cherokee grandparent. He was a resident of Midland, Texas and attended Robert E. Lee High School.

Jones graduated from the St. Mark's School of Texas, where he is now on the board of directors, and attended Harvard College on a need-based scholarship, staying in Mower B-12 as a freshman, across the hall from future Vice President Al Gore. As an upperclassman, he was roommates with Gore and Bob Somerby, who later became editor of the media criticism site the Daily Howler. Another actor who rose to prominence, John Lithgow, also lived in Dunster House. Jones played offensive tackle on Harvard's undefeated 1968 varsity football team, was nominated as a first-team All-Ivy League selection, and played in the memorable and literal last-minute Harvard sixteen-point comeback to tie Yale in the 1968 Game. Jones graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1969.

Tommy Lee Jones: Career

Jones moved to New York to become an actor, making his Broadway debut in 1969's A Patriot for Me in a number of supporting roles. In 1970, he landed his first film role, appropriately playing a Harvard student in Love Story (Erich Segal, the author of "Love Story," said that he based the lead character of Oliver on the two undergrad roommates he knew while teaching at Harvard, Jones and Gore).

In early 1971, he returned to Broadway in Abe Burrows' Four on a Garden where he shared the stage with Carol Channing and Sid Caesar. Between 1971 and 1975, he portrayed Dr. Mark Toland on the ABC soap opera, One Life to Live. He returned to the stage for a 1974 production of Ulysses in Nighttown with Zero Mostel. In films, he played an escaped convict hunted in Jackson County Jail (1976), a Vietnam veteran in Rolling Thunder (1977) and an automobile mogul, co-starring with Laurence Olivier, in the Harold Robbins drama The Betsy.

In 1980, Jones earned his first Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of country singer Loretta Lynn's husband, Doolittle "Mooney" Lynn, in the popular Coal Miner's Daughter. In 1981, he played a drifter opposite Sally Field in Back Roads, a comedy that received middling reviews.

In 1983, he received an Emmy for Best Actor for his performance as murderer Gary Gilmore in a TV adaptation of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. That same year he starred in a pirate adventure, Nate and Hayes, playing the heavily bearded Captain Bully Hayes.

In 1989, he earned another Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Texas Ranger lawman Woodrow F. Call in the acclaimed television mini-series Lonesome Dove, based on the best-seller by Larry McMurtry.

In the 1990s, blockbuster hits such as The Fugitive co-starring Harrison Ford, Batman Forever co-starring Val Kilmer, and Men in Black with Will Smith made Jones one of the best-paid and most in-demand actors in Hollywood. His role in The Fugitive won wide acclaim and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. When he accepted his Oscar, his head was shaved for his role in the film Cobb, a situation he made light of in his speech with: "All a man can say at a time like this is 'I am not really bald.'"

Among his other well-known performances during the 1990s were those as an accused conspirator in the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1991's JFK (earning him another Oscar nomination), as a terrorist who hijacks a U.S. Navy battleship in 1992's Under Siege and as a maximum-security prison warden in way over his head in 1994's Natural Born Killers.

Jones co-starred with director Clint Eastwood as astronauts in the 2000 film Space Cowboys, leading a space rescue mission.

In 2005, the first theatrical feature film Jones directed, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, was presented at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. In it, Jones speaks both English and Spanish. It won him the Best Actor Award. His first film as a director had been in 1995, a made-for-television movie.

Two strong performances in 2007 marked a resurgence in Jones' career, one as a beleaguered father investigating the disappearance of his soldier son in In the Valley of Elah, the other as a Texas sheriff hunting an assassin in the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. For the former, he was nominated for an Academy Award.

Jones has been a spokesperson for Japanese brewing company Suntory since 2006. He can be seen in various Japanese TV commercials of Suntory's Coffee brand Boss as a character called "Alien Jones," an extraterrestrial who takes the form of a human being to check on the world of humans. There are 19 such commercials that can be seen on YouTube.

Tommy Lee Jones: Personal life

At the 2000 Democratic National Convention, he presented the nominating speech for his college roommate, Al Gore, as the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States.

Jones was married to Kate Lardner, the daughter of Ring Lardner Jr. from 1971 to 1978. Jones has two children from his second marriage to Kimberlea Cloughley, the daughter of Phil Hardberger, the mayor of San Antonio: Austin Leonard (born 1982) and Victoria Kafka (born 1991). On March 19, 2001, he married his third wife, Dawn Laurel.

Jones resides in Terrell Hills, Texas, a town near San Antonio. He reportedly owns a large ranch in San Saba County, Texas off Chappell Hill Road. He also owns another ranch near Van Horn, Texas which served as the set for Jones' film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

Tommy Lee Jones: Film and television credits