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Tommy Lee Jones Biography

(1946–)

Related Works

2007 No Country for Old Men
2007 In the Valley of Elah
1980 Barn Burning (TV)

1977 The Amazing Howard Hughes (TV)
1994 Natural Born Killers
1987 The Big Town
1978 The Betsy
1994 The Client
1982 The Executioner's Song (TV)
1988 April Morning (TV)
1976 Jackson County Jail
1995 The Good Old Boys (TV)
1990 Fire Birds
1984 The River Rat
1994 Cobb
1988 Gotham (TV)
1985 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (TV)
1997 Men in Black
1971 One Life to Live (TV series )
1988 Stormy Monday
1981 Back Roads
1980 Coal Miner's Daughter
1999 Double Jeopardy
1970 Love Story
1994 Blown Away
1997 Volcano
1978 Eyes of Laura Mars
1998 U.S. Marshals
1993 House of Cards
2000 Space Cowboys
1991 JFK
1982 The Rainmaker (TV)
1986 Black Moon Rising
1976 Smash-Up on Interstate 5 (TV)
1986 Charlie's Angels (TV)
1987 Broken Vows (TV)
2000 Rules of Engagement
1995 Batman Forever
1993 Heaven & Earth
1970 Eliza's Horoscope
1994 Blue Sky
1986 Yuri Nosenko, KGB (TV)
1986 The Park Is Mine (TV)
1983 Nate and Hayes
1989 Lonesome Dove (TV miniseries)
1989 The Package
1993 The Fugitive
1973 Life Study
1998 Small Soldiers (voice)
1992 Under Siege
1988 Stranger on My Land (TV)
1977 Rolling Thunder
2002 Men in Black II
2005 Man of the House
2005 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

» More

Related Sites

Tommy Lee Jones fan Web site

An actor, director, screenwriter, Tommy Lee Jones was born September 15, 1946, in San Saba, Texas. An eighth-generation Texan, Jones was the only child of Clyde Jones, a cowboy-turned-oil-field worker, and his wife, Lucille Marie. His parents were married and divorced twice; as he later revealed in interviews, Jones had a difficult adolescence, enduring a good deal of physical abuse at the hands of his father. When Tommy Lee was a teenager, 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 school, so that he could stay in the country.

A talented 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 future United States senator, vice president, and presidential candidate. Jones, an English literature major, became an all-Ivy offensive guard on the football team. He also loved drama and performed in a number of school productions, most notably playing the lead in Shakespeare's Coriolanus.

With too slight a frame to make it in the National Football League (NFL), Jones headed to New York to pursue a career as an actor upon his graduation from Harvard in 1969. He won his first professional role shortly thereafter, in an off-Broadway production. In addition to his stage work, Jones had a regular role as Dr. Mark Toland on the ABC 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 character in the weepy Love Story.

Frustrated with the dwindling opportunities on 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 well as his first lead role in a Hollywood feature, the 1976 crime drama Jackson County Jail, produced by edgy B-movie icon Roger Corman. (Jones' first-ever big screen lead was in the little-seen 1970 Canadian film Eliza's Horoscope.)

Over the next two decades, Jones appeared in nearly three dozen film and television projects and turned in a number of critically acclaimed performances. Highlights of his pre-Fugitive career included well received TV movies such as The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), The Executioner's Song (1982) - for which he won an Emmy Award - and the celebrated CBS miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989), costarring Robert Duvall, Anjelica Huston, and Diane Lane, among others. He also earned kudos for his supporting performances in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), costarring Sissy Spacek, and Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), starring Kevin Costner. For the latter film, Jones earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Clay Shaw, a homosexual Dallas businessman and suspected conspirator in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.