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Biography
In building a picture of Tommy Lee Jones,
it's interesting to compare him to others born in the same year. Like
Dolly Parton, he's a down-home country-type, but with a similar wild
streak to David Lynch's. Onscreen, he possesses the same outlandish
charisma as Alan Rickman. Off-screen, his passion and artistic
tunnel-vision have caused him problems with his peers, much like Syd
Barrett. But then that year also saw the arrival of Ted Bundy and Ian
Lavender, so go figure.
Perhaps it's more revealing to compare him with Oliver Stone. Both are
challenging and controversial in their work, both have risen from rough,
macho beginnings to the heights of Hollywood (a system in which they
excel yet somehow do not fit), and both have peculiar and uncompromising
views of how things should be done. And strangely, considering they have
so many similarities and have worked together so many times, Stone and
Jones were born on exactly the same day - the 15th of September, 1946.
Tommy's birthplace was San Saba, Texas, about 80 miles north-west of
Austin. He's an 8th generation Texan, though he's one quarter Cherokee,
with Welsh ancestry. His father, Clyde C. Jones (he had no middle name,
just the C), was an oil-field worker, who'd laboured in Libya, but
mostly in Texas. Tommy's mother, Lucille Marie (nee Scott, known as
Marie), was a police officer and a hairdresser, later owning a beauty
parlour. She bore another child, a son, when Tommy was 3, but the child
sadly died in infancy.
Tommy's early life was tough. The family originally raised cattle, but
were crushed by an extended drought in the early Fifties and forced to
rethink their lives. Clyde was a drinker and Tommy's described his
relationship with him as "combative and emotionally abusive. He
wasn't there for me that much". Clyde and Marie would divorce when
Tommy was still young, then remarry and divorce again.
Disturbed by his turbulent home-life,
Tommy threw himself into both studies and sport. At Alamo Junior High,
in Midland, he was a fine student and a keen football player, and these
qualities won him a scholarship to St Mark's School of Texas, a
prestigious prep school for boys, in Dallas. Football came to dominate
his life, but did not prevent him from getting involved in the most
un-jock-like pastime of acting. Having accidentally burst in upon a
rehearsal of Mister Roberts, he was intrigued and enthused, quickly
scoring parts in Under Milk Wood (perfect for a fine Welsh lad), and The
Caine Mutiny Court Martial. "My feelings at this discovery,"
he said later "were indescribable".
In his late teens, he worked to finance himself on the oil-fields and in
underwater construction, building the rugged persona we know so well
today. Then came another football scholarship, this time to Harvard.
Here, between 1966 and 1968, he was a real football star, an
All-American who made the All-Ivy and All-East teams. In '68, he played
offensive guard in The Tie, a famous 29-all draw with Yale. His
ambition, naturally for a Texan kid, was to play for the Dallas Cowboys.
Trouble was, despite being 6 feet tall and fairly well-built, he was too
small. "I played a good game," he's said "but I was often
at the mercy of the bigger guys". So Tommy turned his attention to
the liberal arts, and went back to acting. He joined the Drama Club and,
in the summers, he worked in rep in Boston and Cambridge, playing
alongside the likes of James Woods, Stockard Channing and John Lithgow,
doing a fair amount of Shakespeare. Then, in 1969, having graduated cum
laude in English and American Literature, he said goodbye to Harvard
(and his room-mate Al Gore, later to be Bill Clinton's Vice-President,
and still a good friend of Tommy's), and took off for New York, to seek
a career in theatre. There had been no acting classes - he was all about
experience.
Amazingly, he got a job within 10 days, in a Broadway adaptation of John
Osborne's A Patriot For Me, both a spy story and a study of early 1900's
decadence in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Over the next few years,
there'd be plenty of stage work, including Fortune And Men's Eyes, Four
In The Garden (with Carol Channing and Sid Caesar), Blue Boys, Ulysses
In Nighttown (with Zero Mostel), and the New York Shakespeare Festival's
staging of Sam Shepard's True West. And there would be love, too. Soon
after moving to New York, Tommy met Kate Lardner, an actress and soon a
writer, and grand-daughter of the famous writer and columnist Ring
Lardner. The couple would marry, with Tommy taking on Kate's two kids.
Things were moving fast. 1970 saw Tommy's big screen debut. Incredibly,
it wasn't as a rough cow-hand or a smiling psychopath, but as Ryan
O'Neal's roomie in the massively popular Love Story. Indeed, it was said
that the book's author, Erich Segal, had based O'Neal's character,
Oliver, on both Al Gore and Tommy himself. There'd also be Eliza's
Horoscope, a weird-out Canadian production about a freaky girl seeking a
soul-mate, with many scenes coming over like hallucinations.
But Tommy's first breakthrough was in
soap. One Life To Live was a very popular and very long-running series,
involving the grand and the lowly folk of Llanview, Pennsylvania. And,
like today's efforts, it made conscious attempts to deal with the issues
of the day, like inter-racial relationships, drug addiction, cultism and
even time travel. Many future stars would serve an apprenticeship here.
Laurence Fishburne would show up a couple of years after Tommy, then Tom
Berenger, Jeff Fahey and, in the early Nineties, Ryan Phillippe.
In One Life To Live, Tommy played Dr Mark Toland, a clean-cut medic with
an increasingly obvious dark side (Toland was once described as being
"more heel than healer"). Marrying into one of Llanview's
richest families, he quickly showed himself to be horribly mendacious,
uncontrollably adulterous and eventually murderous. But it was his
penchant for blackmail that finally undid him. Trying to shake some poor
woman down, he was shot dead - ironically, he was mistaken for a
different adulterer.
The real reason behind Toland's sudden death was Tommy's decision that,
after 5 years on the show, he needed to move on. He'd been working
onstage at night, but his career was not really progressing. "I was
reasonably well-known as a young actor," he said later "but
Broadway was going through a phase of decay. The plays were getting
bigger, broader, less dramatic and coarser... If I wanted my creative
life to grow, the marketplace was telling me I needed to be more
famous".
So, off he went to Los Angeles, taking Kate and the kids with him. And
the parts came his way. Having appeared in the pilot episode of
Charlie's Angels, where the girls went undercover at a vineyard, and the
cheapo disaster flick Smash-Up On Interstate 5, he won his first
stand-out role. This was as Coley Blake in Jackson County Jail where
Frenchwoman Yvette Mimieux was robbed, jailed for having no passport,
then raped by a copper who she promptly killed. Then she goes on the run
with a charismatic, golden-hearted convict - Tommy.
This was a showy part, much like Martin Sheen's in Badlands, and brought
Tommy to prominence in Hollywood. His next part would garner him
national attention. The title role in The Amazing Howard Hughes really
allowed him to open up. Funny, kind, cold, paranoid and wholly
enigmatic, he wasn't exactly likeable, but he was genuinely sympathetic,
making the mysterious Hughes far easier to comprehend. He was enjoying
(newfound) wealth in real life, too. The end of 1976 had seen his
marriage fall apart (he'd be divorced in 1978), and now he was fully
engaging in the Hollywood lifestyle, with flashy cars and pneumatic
starlets.
Work-wise, he was on the rise. In Rolling
Thunder, he played a war veteran helping his old military buddy William
Devane take bloody revenge in Civvy Street. Then came The Betsy, a
blockbusting tale of race-driving and corporate skulduggery. Here
Laurence Olivier played a patriarch who hires whizz-kid driver Tommy to
help develop a fuel-efficient motor, against the wishes of Robert
Duvall, Olivier's grandson and head of the family business, who actually
wants to shut the motor division down.
It was typical Seventies fare, a
pre-Dynasty epic, but it was interesting for two reasons. One, Tommy
worked for the first time with Duvall, who'd become a close friend and
later co-star in one of Tommy's biggest hits. And it set Tommy against
Olivier. Critics at the time said Olivier was near-sleepwalking through
the production - apart from his scenes with Tommy. Legendarily
competitive, Olivier came alive when Jones was present, his survival
instinct kicking in when he was threatened by this ebullient,
scene-stealing newcomer.
After The Betsy came another film typical of the decade. Written by John
Carpenter, The Eyes Of Laura Mars had Faye Dunaway as a fashion
photographer who starts having visions. More accurately, she starts
seeing what a serial killer is seeing as they go about their beastly
business. Tommy was the cop on the case, keeping it cool while Dunaway
freaked and twitched in her usual histrionic manner.
Now came Tommy's second spell in the national limelight. Plans were
afoot for a biopic of Country star Loretta Lynn, with Sissy Spacek set
to star. Mike Nesmith, formerly of the Monkees but by now a respected
solo musician and writer, was down to co-star as Loretta's husband,
Doolittle Lynn, who married her when she was 13, recognised her talent,
bought her a guitar and helped her on her way to superstardom. But
Spacek, a Texas girl herself, had other ideas, and fought, successfully,
for Tommy to play Doolittle. He did and, unbelievably charming and
utterly credible, was nominated for a Golden Globe.
After this success, as is the way with Hollywood, Tommy was offered a
plethora of down-home roles. He mixed pride and evil as Abner Snopes in
Barn Burning, a revenge tale based on the work of William Faulkner. Then
came Back Roads, a comedy directed by Martin Ritt and starring Sally
Field, who'd recently won an Oscar for Ritt's Norma Rae. This was a
hit-and-miss affair, concerning a Southern hooker (Field) who meets up
with boxer-on-the-slide Tommy and takes off West in the hope of a better
life. It was also one of the first examples of people reacting badly to
Tommy's working practices. As tough on others as he is on himself, he's
notoriously impatient with people he believes to be wasting his time.
After the shoot, Field was quoted as saying "I never want to work
with him again".
Yet Back Roads did bring Tommy some joy, as onset he met Kimberlea Gayle
Cloughley. The couple would marry in 1981, remaining married till 1996,
and producing two children - Austin Leonard, known as Bubba, and
Victoria Kafka, called Tory.
Difficult though he was, Tommy was making
a career playing difficult characters. Now came one of his finest hours,
when he played Gary Gilmore in Norman's Mailer's The Executioner's Song.
This was a biopic following Gilmore from May 1976 to January 1977.
Released from jail, he'd killed two men in separate robberies and was
sentenced to death by firing squad. Much controversy surrounded the
case. The US government had only re-instated capital punishment in '76
and many were vehemently against it. But Gilmore, rather than appealing
for the support of the decent millions, instead demanded that his
sentence be carried out. And Tommy was brilliant in the lead role, wild
and disturbed, for sure, but also genuinely human, asking the audience
to consider what it is that makes such a criminal. Rosanna Arquette was
tremendous, too, as a woman fatally attracted to bad men. Tommy earned
his first major award, an Emmy.
Jones now played a series of troubled yet charismatic characters. In
John Frankenheimer's The Rainmaker he was Starbuck, a travellin'
witch-doctor promising to bring much-needed sky-fall to a drought-bound
farm. Next he was Captain Bully Hayes in the 19th Century pirate
adventure Nate And Hayes, written by a pre-Breakfast Club John Hughes.
Then he was Martha Plimpton's ex-jailbird dad in The River Rat, where an
idyllic country childhood is complicated by a murder mystery.
After this came a prime (and more theatrical) role in Tennessee
Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Here Tommy and Jessica Lange took the
roles of alcoholic Brick Pollitt and his sexually rapacious wife Maggie,
originally played by Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor. It was a storming
success, using a Williams script that reintroduced much of the sexual
candidness missing from other productions.
Despite his evident talents, and the success of The Executioner's Song,
Tommy was now slipping away from the big time. In The Park Is Mine, he
played a Vietnam vet who, determined that his dead colleagues won't be
forgotten, seizes hostages and takes over Central Park, defying the
authorities with his cunning booby-traps and jungle warfare tactics.
After this came Black Moon Rising, again written by John Carpenter,
where he was an ex-thief, forced by the FBI to steal an incriminating
tape from an evil corporation.
Nearly caught, he hides it in a prototype
super-car, itself then stolen by Linda "Terminator" Hamilton.
Next came Yuri Nosenko, KGB, where Tommy played a CIA agent trying to
ascertain whether a defector is for real. Then, in Broken Vows, he was
an urban priest losing his faith who, intrigued by the last words of a
murdered good-guy, helps his girlfriend seek the killer, at the same
time learning about love and spiritual life in the city.
1987 brought Big Town, a Matt Dillon star-vehicle where Dillon was a
small-town gambler making his way in the city. Scoring big in Tommy's
club, he attracts Tommy's wife, leading to a final crap-table
confrontation. Then came Stranger On My Land, where he played yet
another Vietnam veteran, this time struggling to keep his farm from
being snatched by the air-force. In April Morning, he played a gruff
father tangled up in the outbreak of the American Revolution, while in
Gotham he was a private dick hired to stop some fellow's wife from
ripping him off. Trouble is, she's been dead for ten years!
Now things began to improve rapidly.
Having played an American hard-nut, bringing his cool brand of mayhem to
Newcastle's underworld, he hit the heights once more with the miniseries
Lonesome Dove. This reunited him with Robert Duvall as they played two
former Texas Rangers, now running a cattle company, who decide to run
their herd up to Montana on one last great adventure. Along the way,
they battle with bandidos, wind-storms, snakes and unfriendly Indians,
and encounter lovers both old (Angelica Huston) and new (Diane Lane -
earlier Tommy's co-star in Big Town). The show, with its detailed
depiction of life in the Old West, was hailed as a classic, with Tommy,
as Woodrow Call, being nominated for both an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
Now the roles became bigger again. In The Package, he played an assassin
out to nail to Soviet premier and thus ruin an upcoming arms deal, while
being pursued by agent Gene Hackman. The thriller was directed by Andrew
Davis, later to direct Tommy in his greatest triumph, The Fugitive. Next
he was a maverick flight instructor, schooling an unruly Nicolas
Cage in Wings Of The Apache. Then came a classic role as Clay Shaw
in Oliver Stone's JFK. Here he was the gentleman and businessman that Kevin
Costner's Jim Garrison brings to trial over the Kennedy
assassination. Was he lying? Was he working for the CIA? Jones gave
nothing away, behaving with a constant and "impenetrable
bemusement". His performance won him his first Oscar nomination.
Next came some fun, in Andrew Davis's Under Siege, where Tommy hammed it
up as the malicious mastermind who takes over the USS Missouri, only to
be foiled by that pesky chef Steven Seagal. Then there was more Oliver
Stone, when he played a military man who can't let Vietnam go in Heaven
And Earth. After this he played a child psychologist, helping Kathleen
Turner's autistic son in House Of Cards. And then came the big one - The
Fugitive. This, an adaptation of the old TV series, saw Harrison
Ford wrongly accused of killing his wife and trying to track down
the one-armed man who did it. Tommy was superb as Deputy Marshal Samuel
Gerard, relentlessly on Ford's tail. Jones would win an Oscar for his
efforts, and star in a sequel, US Marshals, where he went after Wesley
Snipes. The movie was not quite as successful as The Fugitive, but still
knocked Titanic from top spot.
After The Fugitive came Blown Away, where he played crazy bomber Ryan
Gaerity, bringing chaos to the streets of Boston and persecuting his old
terrorist mucker Jeff Bridges, now a respectable member of the Bomb
Squad. Next came The Client, where he played the Scripture-quoting,
thunder-stealing prosecutor of a Mob boss, causing problems for lawyer
Susan Sarandon and her young star witness. Then he was flamboyant once
more as warden Dwight McClusky in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers,
running his prison like a labour camp and revelling in the presence of
the TV cameras following psycho-couple Woody Harrelson and Juliette
Lewis.
Next came some smaller, but equally
interesting projects. Blue Sky had been completed in 1991 but, due to
the collapse of Orion Pictures, was shelved till 1994. Here Tommy was a
US major, monitoring nuclear tests in Alabama while his beautiful but
disturbed wife (Jessica Lange, winding him up once more) seeks comfort
in the arms of Tommy's peer Powers Boothe. After this came Cobb. This
was a biopic of the infamous baseball player Ty Cobb, a brilliant
athlete seemingly keen to hurt both his opponents and friends. With a
subject close to his own confrontational persona, Tommy was excellent,
showing Cobb as angry, violent, racist, misogynist but, as with Gary
Gilmore, very human.
After Cobb came a pet project, The Good Old Boys, which Tommy himself
directed, having written a tele-play based on Elmer Kelton's novel. Here
he played another charismatic cowpoke who, after years of carousing,
returns to his brother's farm and tries to save it from foreclosure. His
reputation for artistry brought in some heavyweight performers, like
Frances McDormand and Sam Shepard, and he also repaid a favour by
casting Sissy Spacek. A pre-Good Will Hunting Matt
Damon was on hand, too.
With his Fugitive Oscar, Tommy was now resolutely of the Big League, and
proved it by playing arch-villain Harvey "Two-Face" Dent in
Batman Forever, directed by Joel Schumacher, helmsman of The Client.
Two-Face is a former DA who blames Batman (Val
Kilmer) for the accident that disfigured him, so he teams up with
The Riddler to bring about the Dark Knight's downfall, as well as those
of Robin (Chris O'Donnell, Tommy's Blue Sky co-star) and Batman's belle,
Dr Chase Meridian (Nicole
Kidman).
By now, Tommy was more than capable of
hamming it up outrageously and, often standing beside Jim
Carrey's frenetic, cane-wielding Riddler, was forced to really go
for it, chuckling and gurning without cessation. Given Carrey's insane
prancings, it was miraculous that Tommy wasn't blown off the screen.
But, no matter how deranged Carrey's antics were, you still found your
eyes drawn to Jones's manic grin.
It wasn't an easy shoot. Perhaps the competition between Jones and
Carrey grew too intense but, afterwards, Schumacher claimed that Tommy
had given Carrey "a horrible time" and "treated him with
disdain", adding that "He's a bully... Not all the talent in
the world excuses that kind of behaviour".
After Batman came more mayhem with Volcano, where he played the head of
LA's Emergency Management team, trying to save his daughter, and
everyone else from waves of lava that have just popped up in the city center.
Then came his biggest hit yet, Men In
Black. Here, as Agent K, he recruits Will
Smith into an agency monitoring and often countering alien activity
on Earth, basically blowing away creepy-looking things with great big
guns. It was a monster, and spawned an equally monstrous sequel wherein
K, who's had his memory removed on retirement from the agency, must have
it restored if he's to help Smith save the world again. Hitherto known
purely for his charisma and intensity, now Tommy was seen as a talented
comedian. He commented on this with typical dryness, saying "the
secret to being funny is to do everything Barry (Sonnenfeld, MIB's
director) tells you and to stand very close to Will
Smith %u2026 and then people think you're funny".
Tommy was now big news. US Marshals was a smash, as was Small Soldiers,
for which he provided the voice of Major Chip Hazard. Even Double
Jeopardy, a fairly weak remake where he played Ashley Judd's parole
officer, beat off George
Clooney's Three Kings to take top spot. After this came Rules Of
Engagement, where he played a lawyer who must defend Samuel L. Jackson,
an army man and former colleague, who saved his life in Vietnam. Tommy
would get on well with the movie's director, fellow maverick William
"Exorcist" Friedkin, and the pair would later collaborate on
The Hunted. Here Tommy played a "deep woods tracker" for the
FBI, pursuing Benicio Del Toro, himself playing a hunter who likes to
hunt other hunters. It was a prequel to Shooter, another Friedkin-Jones
collaboration yet to see the light of day.
After Rules Of Engagement, Tommy joined up with a team of ageing
astronauts sent to save a falling Russian satellite in Clint Eastwood's
Space Cowboys. As "Hawk" Hawkins, a crazy test pilot who's now
a crazy crop-duster, he was more than a match for Eastwood and fellow
renegade Donald Sutherland. Then, of course, there was Men In Black 2,
placing Tommy high up there in the Hollywood pantheon and ensuring his
professional future for many years to come.
By this time, Tommy was married again, this time to Dawn Maria Laurel,
18 years his junior. She'd been an assistant camera-woman on The Good
Old Boys, having earlier worked on Back To The Future 2 and Passenger
57. Tommy would live with her on his 3,000-acre ranch near San Antonio,
where he raises cattle and ponies and invites such friends as Gore and
Duvall, as well as Gary Busey, Willie Nelson and Oliver Stone. Each
Autumn, too, he invites Harvard's best polo players down to practise -
Tommy also raising ponies and being a fine polo player himself.
So, from the implausible beginnings of Love Story and soap operatics,
Tommy Lee Jones has risen to the pinnacle of his profession, and plays
action heroes well into his fifties. Such is his personality and mighty
energy, it's impossible to think that he'll ever fade away. ~ Dominic
Wills
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