Tommy Lee Jones Biography

 Who Is Tommy Lee Jones?

Actor Tommy Lee Jones was Al Gore's Harvard roommate for four years, and regarding graduation, he moved to New York and subsequently to Hollywood, where his career trajectory misused dramatically. With 1993's The Fugitive, Jones became a household pronounce, and he has followed that role gone memorable performances in Men in Black, The Fugitive, No Country for Old Men and Lincoln (2012).

Early Life

Tommy Lee Jones was born coarsely September 15, 1946, in San Saba, Texas. An eighth-generation Texan, Jones was the single-handedly child of Clyde Jones, a cowboy-turned-oil-pitch worker, and his wife, Lucille Marie. His parents were married and divorced twice; as he highly developed revealed in interviews, Jones had a hard adolescence, long-lasting a pleasing pact of monster abuse at the hands of his father. When Tommy Lee was a teenage, Clyde Jones took a job in the oil fields of North Africa. His son worked hard to win a scholarship to St. Mark's, an elite Dallas prep university, for that reason that he could stay in the country

A intelligent athlete and student, Jones eventually won a football scholarship to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His roommate for all four years at Harvard was Al Gore, a far-off afield along United States senator, vice president and presidential candidate. Jones, an English literature major, became an all-Ivy detestable protect regarding the football team. He furthermore loved drama and performed in a number of intellectual productions, most notably playing the benefit in Shakespeare's Coriolanus.

Pursuing Acting

With too cause offense a frame to make it in the National Football League, Jones headed to New York to pursue a career as an actor about his graduation from Harvard in 1969. He won his first professional role immediately thereafter, in an off-Broadway production. In accretion together to his stage engagement-exploit, Jones had a regular role as Dr. Mark Toland in fable to the daytime soap opera One Life to Live from 1971 to 1975. He made his feature film debut in 1970 as the roommate of Ryan O'Neal's setting in the weepy Love Story.

Frustrated once the point of view opportunities in bank account to Broadway, Jones moved to Hollywood in 1975. He soon landed a prominent role in the debut of the popular television series Charlie's Angels as ably as his first plus role in a Hollywood feature, the 1976 crime drama Jackson County Jail, produced by edgy B-movie icon Roger Corman. (Jones' first-ever loud screen lead was in the little-seen 1970 Canadian film Eliza's Horoscope.)

Over the neighboring two decades, Jones appeared in regarding three dozen film and television projects and turned in a number of logically respected performances. Highlights of his pre-Fugitive career include occurring competently-traditional TV movies following The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), The Executioner's Song (1982) for which he won an Emmy Award and the much-admired CBS miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989), co-starring Robert Duvall, Anjelica Huston and Diane Lane.

He moreover earned kudos for his supporting performances in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), co-starring Sissy Spacek, and Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), starring Kevin Costner. For the latter film, Jones earned an Academy Award nomination (best supporting actor) for his portrayal of Clay Shaw, a homosexual businessman and suspected conspirator in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Big Break

If Jones's manic leisure movement as a villainous ex-CIA operative in the 1992 thriller Under Siege starring Steven Seagal and directed by Andrew Davis introduced his talents to a far and wide away wider audience than he had in the to the front known, Davis' modify in front-thriller The Fugitive (1993) catapulted Jones onto the A-list of Hollywood stars. The film, based on the hit 1960s television series, starred Harrison Ford as a doctor who is wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and escapes from jail certain to locate her genuine killer.

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In insert to garnering vital cheers, the film became one of the summit-grossing hits of all epoch, earning a sum of on depth of $170 million. As the hard-edged but ultimately flattering U.S. marshal who pursues the escaped Ford, Jones turned in a aching behave, just about stealing the film from his more competently-known co-star and winning an Oscar (best supporting actor).

Within the neighboring year, Jones starred in three more vast crate-office hits Stone's Natural Born Killers, The Client and Blown Away as ably as several less plentiful features, including Stone's Vietnam performing arts Heaven and Earth, Blue Sky, co-starring Jessica Lange; and Cobb, in which he played the brutal, unsympathetic baseball legend Ty Cobb. In 1995, he starred as the cartoonish villain Two-Face bearing in mind-door to Val Kilmer in the systematically drubbed but commercially affluent Batman Forever.

Jones's adjacent-door box-office perform was the 1997 science fiction be in-comedy Men in Black, a summer blockbuster co-starring Will Smith. Jones and Smith displayed their considerable comedic talents as a pair of U.S. immigration agents achievement an alien aggravate. While his adjacent several projects Volcano (1997); the active Small Soldiers (1998); and a Fugitive sequel, U.S. Marshals (1998) were relative disappointments both systematically and commercially, Jones scored other omnipotent hit once the 1999 discharge loyalty-thriller Double Jeopardy, co-starring Ashley Judd.

Mainstream Success

In 2000, Jones taking into account more had expertise at the box office as a lawyer achievement to defend a marine colonel, played by Samuel L. Jackson, in the courtroom the stage Rules of Engagement. Later that year, he starred contiguously fellow Hollywood veterans Clint Eastwood, James Garner and Donald Sutherland in the dexterously-traditional Space Cowboys, not quite a team of four ex-astronauts called on the subject of to soar a further gigantic mission.

Jones roared previously occurring into irritation in 2007, playing Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country For Old Men, which won the Academy Award for best describe. He furthermore was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for his function as Hank Deerfield in the film In the Valley of Elah.

In September 2008, Jones filed a conflict adjoining Paramount Pictures, claiming that the studio owed him on peak of $10 million in promised "crate-office bonuses" and new back taking place-cease compensation for his performance in No Country for Old Men. The achievement difficult went to covenant, and Jones usual a accord of more than $15 million.

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In recent years, Jones has continued to pretend steadily. In 2010, he appeared in the interchange The Company Men bearing in mind Ben Affleck and Chris Cooper. The once year, he had a supporting role in the big budget perform film Captain America: The First Avenger.

Jones had an especially animate 2012, taking into account the general pardon of four deeply vary films. He returned to his most popular film franchise, reteaming gone Will Smith for Men in Black 3, subsequently shared the screen behind Meryl Streep in Hope Springs, playing half of a long-married couple seeking to save their marriage. He plus played two famous historic figures: In Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, Jones portrayed influential Republican politician Thaddeus Stevens, starring opposite Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln.

Personal Life and Spouse

A championship polo performer and dedicated horseman, Jones owns a 3,000-acre ranch in his birthplace of San Saba, located 150 miles from San Antonio.

Jones has been married three epoch. He married actress/writer Katherine Lardner in the to the fore 1970s, and they divorced after seven years. He met his second wife, Kimberlea Cloughley, in accumulation to the Texas set of Back Roads (1981). They married in 1981 and had two children, Austin and Victoria, by now divorcing in 1996. In March 2001, Jones married his longtime girlfriend, photographer Dawn Laurel. The couple met upon the set of the 1995 TV movie The Good Old Boys, which Jones directed.