Tommy Lee Jones

Early life

Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946) is an American actor and film director. He has received four Academy Award nominations, winning Best Supporting Actor for his performance as U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard in the 1993 thriller film The Fugitive.

Jones was the only surviving child born to an oil field labourer and his wife, who worked in law enforcement, education, and cosmetology. When his father accepted a job overseas, Jones remained in the United States, having obtained a football scholarship that allowed him to attend an exclusive Dallas boarding school.

College

He attended Harvard College on a need-based scholarship; his roommate was future Vice President Al Gore. As an upperclassman, he stayed in Dunster House with roommates Gore and Bob Somerby, who later became editor of the media criticism site The Daily Howler.

Jones played on the football team, notably participating in the famed 1968 game between Harvard and Yale that ended in a tie, and continued to appear in theatre productions on campus and with repertory companies during the summers.

Jones graduated in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in English and, having proved physically unsuited to professional football, decamped to New York City in pursuit of an acting career.

Career

Jones moved to New York to become an actor, making his Broadway debut in 1969's A Patriot for Me in a number of supporting roles. In 1970, he landed his first film role, coincidentally playing a Harvard student in Love Story.

He starred as a doctor (1971–75) on the television soap opera One Life to Live and appeared in the 1976 pilot episode of the action comedy series Charlie’s Angels. Having moved to Los Angeles in 1975, Jones continued to find work in television, notably playing film producer Howard Hughes in The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977).

He made big-screen appearances in The Betsy (1978), an adaptation of novelist Harold Robbins’s pulpy auto industry melodrama in which he played a race-car driver; Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), a thriller about a fashion photographer who experiences prescient visions of murder in which he featured as the killer; and Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), a biographical film about country singer Loretta Lynn, in which he played her husband.

Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones in Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), directed by Irvin Kershner.

In 1983, he received an Emmy for Best Actor for his performance as murderer Gary Gilmore in a TV adaptation of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. That same year he starred in a pirate adventure, Nate and Hayes, playing the heavily bearded pirate Captain Bully Hayes.

In 1989, he earned another Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call in the acclaimed television mini-series Lonesome Dove, based on the best-seller by Larry McMurtry.