Tommy Lee Jones

His mother, Lucille Marie Jones (Scott; 1928–2013), was a police officer, school teacher, and beauty shop owner, and his Welsh father, Clyde C. Jones (1926–1986), was a cowboy and oil field worker.

The two were married and divorced twice.

Jones has said he is of part Cherokee descent.

He was raised in Midland, Texas, and attended Robert E. Lee High School (now Legacy High School).

Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946) is an American actor.

He has received various accolades including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Primetime Emmy Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Jones was born on September 15, 1946, in San Saba, Texas.

Jones later moved to Dallas and graduated from the St. Mark's School of Texas in 1965, which he attended on scholarship.

Jones entered Harvard College in 1965 on need-based aid.

As an upperclassman, he lived in Dunster House and was roommates with future U.S. Vice President Al Gore and with Bob Somerby, who later became editor of the media criticism site The Daily Howler.

Jones majored in English literature and was a pupil of dramatist Robert Chapman.

Jones played guard on the Harvard Crimson football team from 1965 to 1968.

He was a member of Harvard's undefeated 1968 football team.

He was named as a first-team All-Ivy League selection, and played in the 1968 Game.

The game featured a memorable and last-minute Harvard 16-point comeback to tie Yale.

He recounted his memory of "the most famous football game in Ivy League history" in the documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29–29.

He graduated in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude.

His senior thesis was on "the mechanics of Catholicism" in the works of Flannery O'Connor.

After graduating from Harvard in 1969, Jones moved to New York City to become an actor, making his Broadway debut in 1969's A Patriot for Me in a number of supporting roles.

While fame somewhat eluded him for much of the 1970s and 1980s, Jones established himself as a leading man in the 1990s, known for his gruff and authoritative film roles.

In 1970, he landed his first film role, coincidentally playing a Harvard student in Love Story (Erich Segal, the author of Love Story, said that he based the lead character of Oliver on aspects of two undergraduate roommates he knew while on a sabbatical at Harvard, Jones and Al Gore).

In early 1971, he returned to Broadway in Abe Burrows' Four on a Garden where he shared the stage with Carol Channing and Sid Caesar.

Between 1971 and 1975 he portrayed Dr. Mark Toland on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live.

He returned to the stage for a short-lived 1974 production of Ulysses in Nighttown, an adaptation of one episode from James Joyce's novel Ulysses, playing Stephen Dedalus opposite Zero Mostel's Leopold Bloom and directed by Burgess Meredith.

It was followed by the acclaimed TV movie The Amazing Howard Hughes, where he played the lead role.

In films, he played a hunted escaped convict in Jackson County Jail (1976), a Vietnam veteran in Rolling Thunder (1977), an automobile mogul, co-starring with Laurence Olivier, in the Harold Robbins drama The Betsy (1978), and a police detective opposite Faye Dunaway in the 1978 thriller Eyes of Laura Mars.

He portrayed Howard Hughes in the CBS film The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977).

Other notable roles were in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), Natural Born Killers (1994), The Client (1994), Batman Forever (1995), Double Jeopardy (1999), No Country for Old Men (2007), The Company Men (2010), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Jason Bourne (2016), and Ad Astra (2019).

In 1980, Jones earned his first Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of country singer Loretta Lynn's husband, Doolittle "Mooney" Lynn, in Coal Miner's Daughter.

In 1981, he played a drifter opposite Sally Field in Back Roads, a comedy that received middling reviews.

Jones won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for his role as executed murderer Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song (1982).

In 1982, he co-starred with Tuesday Weld in the HBO adaptation of The Rainmaker, directed by John Frankenheimer.

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.

The same year, he starred in a pirate adventure, Nate and Hayes, playing pirate captain Bully Hayes.

He was further nominated for playing Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call in the television miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989).

His other Oscar-nominated roles were as businessman Clay Shaw in JFK (1991), Hank Deerfield in In the Valley of Elah (2007), and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens in Lincoln (2012).

He played Agent K in the Men in Black franchise.

He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard in the thriller film The Fugitive (1993).

He directed and starred in the western TNT movie The Good Old Boys (1995).

He directed, starred in and executive produced the HBO film The Sunset Limited (2011).