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Quick Facts
- NAME: Tommy Lee Jones
- OCCUPATION: Film Actor, Television Actor, Director
- BIRTH DATE: September 15, 1946 (Age: 66)
- EDUCATION: Harvard University
- PLACE OF BIRTH: San Saba, Texas
- ZODIAC SIGN: Virgo
Best Known For
Tommy Lee Jones is an American actor known for his roles in Men in Black, The Fugitive, No Country for Old Men and Lincoln (2012).
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Tommy Lee Jones - Breakout Roles
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Play NowTommy Lee Jones. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 11:20, May 25, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/tommy-lee-jones-9542352.
Tommy Lee Jones. [Internet]. 2013. The Biography Channel website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/tommy-lee-jones-9542352 [Accessed 25 May 2013].
"Tommy Lee Jones." 2013. The Biography Channel website. May 25 2013, 11:20 http://www.biography.com/people/tommy-lee-jones-9542352.
"Tommy Lee Jones," The Biography Channel website, 2013, http://www.biography.com/people/tommy-lee-jones-9542352 [accessed May 25, 2013].
"Tommy Lee Jones," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/tommy-lee-jones-9542352 (accessed May 25, 2013).
Tommy Lee Jones [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 25] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/tommy-lee-jones-9542352.
Tommy Lee Jones, http://www.biography.com/people/tommy-lee-jones-9542352 (last visited May 25, 2013).
Tommy Lee Jones. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/tommy-lee-jones-9542352. Accessed May 25, 2013.
He also 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 Dallas businessman and suspected conspirator in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Big Break
If Jones's manic performance 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 wider audience than he had previously known, Davis' action-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 determined to find her true killer. In addition to garnering critical acclaim, the film became one of the top-grossing hits of all time, earning a total of over $170 million. As the hard-edged but ultimately sympathetic U.S. marshal who pursues the escaped Ford, Jones turned in a brilliant performance, virtually stealing the film from his more famous co-star and winning an Oscar (best supporting actor).
Within the next year, Jones starred in three more huge box-office hits—Stone's Natural Born Killers, The Client and Blown Away—as well as several less successful features, including Stone's Vietnam drama 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 alongside Val Kilmer and Jim Carrey in the critically drubbed but commercially successful Batman Forever.
Jones's next box-office triumph was the 1997 science fiction action-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 fighting an alien invasion. While his next several projects—Volcano (1997); the animated Small Soldiers (1998); and a Fugitive sequel, U.S. Marshals (1998)—were relative disappointments both critically and commercially, Jones scored another huge hit with the 1999 action-thriller Double Jeopardy, co-starring Ashley Judd.
Mainstream Success
In 2000, Jones again had success at the box office as a lawyer fighting to defend a marine colonel, played by Samuel L. Jackson, in the courtroom drama Rules of Engagement. Later that year, he starred alongside fellow Hollywood veterans Clint Eastwood, James Garner and Donald Sutherland in the well-received Space Cowboys, about a team of four ex-astronauts called upon to fly one more big mission.
Jones roared back into prominence in 2007, playing Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country For Old Men, which won the Academy Award for best picture.
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