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Tommy Lee Jones

Tommy Lee Jones has built a screen career around authority, pressure and a particularly dry way of cutting through nonsense. Born on September 15, 1946, in San Saba, Texas, he studied English literature at Harvard, played guard on the university’s football team and moved to New York after graduating in 1969. His early work included Broadway, television and a first film role in Love Story, but the shape of his career would eventually become much harder to pin to any one genre. Coal Miner’s Daughter offered an important early showcase in 1980, with Jones playing Doolittle “Mooney” Lynn and receiving a Golden Globe nomination. Television brought another major turn when his performance as Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song won a Primetime Emmy Award. By the 1990s, he had become an especially effective presence in thrillers and large-scale studio movies, moving from Clay Shaw in JFK and a battleship-hijacking terrorist in Under Siege to a prison warden caught in the chaos of Natural Born Killers. The Fugitive remains one of the clearest expressions of what Jones does so well. As Deputy U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard, he made relentless pursuit feel sharp, practical and unexpectedly funny, winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Men in Black then put his severity to comic use: opposite Will Smith, his Agent K treats extraterrestrial disorder as another demanding day at the office. He returned for Men in Black II in 2002. Jones’s work as a film actor has been matched by credits as a director and producer. He directed the television film The Good Old Boys and later the theatrical feature The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, winning the Best Actor Award at Cannes for his performance in the latter. In No Country for Old Men, Jones played a Texas sheriff hunting an assassin. The role drew on his familiar command without making that command seem invulnerable, giving the film a weary human perspective. Across comedy, crime, political drama and action, Jones has repeatedly shown how much can be done with restraint—and how forcefully a quiet reaction can land.