James Earl Jones Had Stutter, Didn’t Talk For Years to Hide It

James Earl Jones had one of the most recognizable voices in the world, but he was silent for years as a child as he struggled with a stutter.

Jones, a prolific actor who famously voiced Darth Vader in “Star Wars,” died on Monday, Sept. 9, at the age of 93.

Fans who heard his booming baritone and elegant diction might be surprised to learn he suffered from a speech impediment that began when he was a young boy.

“I don’t mind talking about my stuttering because it’s just another example of you finding yourself with a weak muscle and you exercise it, and sometimes that becomes your strong muscle,” Jones told KCRA in 1986.

“I was mute from grade one through freshman year in high school — mute because I just gave up on talking.”

He talked to animals, but it was “too embarrassing and too painful” to talk to people, Jones told TODAY in 2001.

After not speaking for eight years, Jones needed a way to express himself, he added, which ultimately led to an acting career.

He credited his high school English teacher, Donald Crouch, for getting him to talk again. Crouch discovered Jones wrote poetry and told him it was so good that he needed to prove he really wrote it by reciting it out loud in front of the class.

“And I did, and didn’t stutter,” Jones recalled in the TODAY interview. That led him to the path of recovering his speech.

Jones went on to become his high school valedictorian, then a student at the University of Michigan, and enjoyed a seven-decade acting career on the stage and screen.

But stuttering was always a part of his life.

“You never get over it, really — you simply learn how to work around it,” the actor said on TODAY.

“I am still a stutterer, by the way. I don’t say I was cured. I’m still a stutterer. I just work with it,” he explained to NPR in 2014.

The famous voice had limits, he told Dick Cavett.

“Being a stutterer for that long in my developing years, I can’t have an extemporaneous conversation,” Jones said. “I can’t be an emcee, for instance, it’s impossible for me. I can’t string ideas and words together that well.”

What causes stutter?

About 3 million Americans stutter, and up to 10% of kids have the speech disorder at some point, though most outgrow it, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. President Biden, for example, has been outspoken about his childhood stutter.

Most commonly, stuttering affects kids as they’re learning speech, but the problem can also start after a person has a stroke, head trauma or other type of brain injury.

The person knows what they want to say but produces disrupted speech, including repetition of sounds, syllables or words, the institute notes.

The precise cause isn’t understood, but stuttering can run in families.

The Stuttering Foundation of America lists Nicole Kidman, Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis among the many famous people who struggled with the speech impediment.

There’s no cure, but treatment and therapy can help control it.