Tommy Lee Jones biography

Synopsis

Early Life

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.

Pursuing Acting

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