Tommy Lee Jones Biography

Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946) is an American actor and film director. He has received four Academy Award nominations, winning one as Best Supporting Actor for his performance as U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard in the 1993 thriller film The Fugitive.

His other notable starring roles include former Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call in the award-winning TV mini-series Lonesome Dove, Agent K in the Men in Black film series, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men, the villain Two-Face in Batman Forever, terrorist William Strannix in Under Siege, a Texas Ranger in Man of the House, rancher Pete Perkins in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which also served as his directorial debut, and Colonel Chester Phillips in Captain America: The First Avenger. Jones has also portrayed real-life figures such as businessman Howard Hughes, Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, executed murderer Gary Gilmore, U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur, Oliver Lynn, husband of Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter, and baseball great Ty Cobb.

Early life

Jones was born in San Saba, Texas. His mother, Lucille Marie (née Scott), was a police officer, school teacher, and beauty shop owner, and his father, Clyde C. Jones, was an oil field worker. The two were married and divorced twice. Jones has stated that his grandmother was of Cherokee ancestry. He was raised in Midland, Texas and attended Robert E. Lee High School.

Jones graduated from the St. Mark's School of Texas, which he attended on scholarship; he now serves on the board of directors. He attended Harvard College on a need-based scholarship. He stayed in Mower B-12 as a freshman, across the hall from future Vice President Al Gore, the son of Senator Albert Gore, Sr. of Tennessee. As an upperclassman, he stayed in Dunster House with roommates Gore and Bob Somerby, who later became editor of the media criticism site the Daily Howler. Jones played offensive guard on Harvard's undefeated 1968 varsity football team, was nominated as a first-team All-Ivy League selection, and played in the 1968 Game, which featured a memorable and literally last-minute Harvard 16-point comeback to tie Yale. He recounts his memory of "the most famous football game in Ivy League history" in the documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. Jones graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1969; his senior thesis was on "the mechanics of Catholicism" in the works of Flannery O'Connor.

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, coincidentally 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 undergraduate roommates he knew while attending 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. It was followed by the acclaimed TV movie The Amazing Howard Hughes, where he played the lead role.

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 pirate 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 performance in The Fugitive received broad acclaim and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and a sequel. When he accepted his Oscar, his head was shaved for his role in the film Cobb, which he made light of in his speech: "The only thing a man can say at a time like this is 'I am not really bald'. Actually I'm lucky to be working".

Among his other well-known performances during the 1990s were those of the accused conspirator Clay Shaw/Clay Bertrand in the 1991 film JFK (which earned him another Oscar nomination), as a terrorist who hijacks a U.S. Navy battleship in Under Siege and as a maximum-security prison warden who's in way over his head in Natural Born Killers.

Jones co-starred with director Clint Eastwood as astronauts in the 2000 film Space Cowboys, in which both played retired pilots and friends/rivals leading a space rescue mission together.

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

Two strong performances in 2007 marked a resurgence in Jones's 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 34 such commercials, many of which can be seen on YouTube.

In 2010, Jones appeared alongside Ben Affleck in the recession drama The Company Men. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where early reviews praised Jones's performance as "pitch-perfect." Jones had a role in the Marvel Studios film, Captain America: The First Avenger. He also directed, produced and co-starred with Samuel L. Jackson in an adaptation of The Sunset Limited.

2012 saw yet another turning point in Jones's career, starting in a reprisal of his role as Agent K in Men in Black 3, the romantic dramedy Hope Springs, and co-starring as Thaddeus Stevens in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. Jones's performance in Lincoln received wide critical acclaim, with many reviewers claiming that he stole the film from star Daniel Day-Lewis. For this performance, Jones received his fourth Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor.

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 screenwriter and journalist Ring Lardner Jr., from 1971 to 1978. He has two children from his second marriage to Kimberlea Cloughley, the daughter of Phil Hardberger, former 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 suburb of San Antonio, and speaks fluent Spanish. He owns a 3000 acre cattle ranch in San Saba County, Texas and a ranch near Van Horn, Texas, which served as the set for his film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. He also owns a home and farm in polo mecca Wellington, Florida. Jones is a serious polo player and he has a house in a polo country club in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a supporter of the Polo Training Foundation. He is an avid San Antonio Spurs fan; he is often seen courtside at Spurs games.

In 2008, Jones signed on with Chesapeake Energy to be a spokesperson for a public relations campaign to promote shale gas (natural gas derived from shale rock through hydraulic fracturing or "fracking") in Texas.

Filmography

Film and television credits

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1970	Love Story	Hank Simpson
1971	One Life to Live	Dr. Mark Toland	2 episodes
1973	Life Study	Gus
1975	Eliza's Horoscope	Tommy Lee
1975	Barnaby Jones	Dr. Jim Melford	Episode: "Fatal Witness"
1976	Baretta	Sharky	Episode: "Dead Man Out"
1976	Charlie's Angels	Aram Kolegian	Premiere episode
1976	Smash-Up on Interstate 5	Officer Hutton	TV
1976	Jackson County Jail	Coley Blake
1976	Family	David Needham	Episode: "Coming of Age"
1977	The Amazing Howard Hughes	Howard Hughes
1977	Rolling Thunder	Corporal Johnny Vohden
1978	The Betsy	Angelo Perino
1978	Eyes of Laura Mars	John Neville
1980	Coal Miner's Daughter	Doolittle "Mooney" Lynn aka "Doo"	Nominated " Golden Globe Award for Best Actor " Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
1980	Barn Burning	Ab Snopes	TV
1981	Back Roads	Elmore Pratt
1982	The Executioner's Song	Gary Mark Gilmore	Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor - Miniseries or a Movie
1982	The Rainmaker	Starbuck	TV
1983	Nate and Hayes	Captain Bully Hayes
1984	The River Rat	Billy
1985	Cat on a Hot Tin Roof	Brick Pollitt	TV
1985	The Park is Mine	Mitch	TV
1986	Black Moon Rising	Quint
1986	Yuri Nosenko: Double Agent	Steve Daley	TV
1987	Broken Vows	Pater Joseph McMahon	TV
1987	The Big Town	George Cole
1988	Stranger on My Land	Bud Whitman	TV
1988	April Morning	Moses Cooper	TV
1988	Stormy Monday	Cosmo
1988	Gotham	Eddie Mallard	TV
1989	Lonesome Dove	Woodrow F. Call
1989	The Package	Thomas Boyette
1990	Fire Birds	Brad Little
1991	JFK	Clay Shaw/Clay Bertrand
1992	Under Siege	William Strannix
1992	House of Cards	Jake Beerlander
1993	The Fugitive	Marshal Samuel Gerard
1993	Heaven & Earth	Steve Butler
1994	Blown Away	Ryan Gaerity	Nominated " MTV Movie Awards for Best Villain
1994	The Client	'Reverend' Roy Foltrigg
1994	Natural Born Killers	Warden Dwight McClusky
1994	Blue Sky	Maj. Henry 'Hank' Marshall
1994	Cobb	Ty Cobb
1995	The Good Old Boys	Hewey Calloway
1995	Batman Forever	Harvey Dent/Two-Face	Nominated " MTV Movie Awards for Best Villain
1997	Volcano	Mike Roark
1997	Men in Black	Kevin Brown/Agent K
1998	U.S. Marshals	Chief Deputy Marshal Samuel Gerard
1998	Small Soldiers	Chip Hazard	Voice
1999	Double Jeopardy	Travis Lehman
2000	Rules of Engagement	Col. Hayes 'Hodge' Hodges
2000	Space Cowboys	William "Hawk" Hawkins
2002	Men in Black II	Kevin Brown/Agent K
2003	The Hunted	L.T. Bonham
2003	The Missing	Samuel Jones / Chaa-duu-ba-its-iidan
2005	Man of the House	Roland Sharp
2005	The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada	Pete Perkins
2006	A Prairie Home Companion	Axeman	Gotham Awards for Best Ensemble Cast
2007	No Country for Old Men	Ed Tom Bell
2007	In the Valley of Elah	Hank Deerfield
2009	In the Electric Mist	Dave Robicheaux
2010	The Company Men	Gene McClary	Nominated " Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actor " Motion Picture
2011	The Sunset Limited	The Professor	Also director and executive producer
2011	Captain America: The First Avenger	Colonel Chester Phillips	Nominated " Scream Award for Best Supporting Actor
2012	Men in Black 3	Kevin Brown/Agent K
2012	Hope Springs	Arnold Soames
2012	Lincoln	Thaddeus Stevens
2013	Emperor	General Douglas MacArthur
2013	The Family	Robert Stansfield
2013	The Homesman	George Briggs	Also director; in post-production