Actor James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader, died at age 93

"I am your father." On Monday James Earl Jones, the legendary American actor who voiced the villain Darth Vader in the Star Wars saga with his baritone voice, died at 93, a spokesperson reported.

With his unforgettable voice-overs in the blockbuster intergalactic saga, as well as King Mufasa in Disney's animated classic The Lion King, Jones won over audiences with his ability to play both the everyman and the otherworldly.

He won three Tony Awards, including a lifetime achievement award, two Emmy Awards and a Grammy, as well as an Honorary Oscar.

In 1971 he became the second African-American to be nominated for an Academy Award for best actor, after Sidney Poitier.

These were hard-won awards for Jones who, born into segregated Mississippi on Jan. 17, 1931, also had to overcome a stutter that barely allowed him to speak when he was a boy.

"Stuttering is painful (...) I would try to read my homework and the kids behind me would fall on the floor laughing," Jones told the Daily Mail in 2010.

Reciting his own poetry helped him regain his speaking cadence, an accomplishment that, much later, would mark pop culture around the globe as he gave voice to the long-cloaked Darth Vader who wore a black military helmet and gas mask.

"He created, with very little dialogue, one of the best villains ever," Star Wars creator George Lucas said at a ceremony honoring Jones in New York in 2015.

"A darker voice"

His first film role was in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Unusual, where he played Lieutenant Zogg aboard a B-52 bomber.

Military themes would recur frequently in his filmography, as in his role of Admiral Greer in the Jack Ryan film saga (The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Imminent Danger), and as a sergeant major in Francis Ford Coppola's Gardens of Stone in 1987.

But his most iconic role would not lead him to appear on the big screen.

Lucas chose him because "he wanted a darker voice" for what would become the most famous villain in movie history, Jones recalls.

"So he hired a guy who was born in Mississippi, grew up in Michigan, stutters, and that voice is me," he recounted in a 2009 interview with the American Film Institute.

At first, the actor did not want his name to appear in the credits of the first episodes of Star Wars, considering that his work to be part of the special effects, and preferred that the recognition fell to the actor behind the mask, David Prowse, according to the magazine Far Out.

But it was Jones with his iconic line "I am your father," when the character reveals his true identity in Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back to Luke Skywalker, played by Mark Hamill, who gave one of cinema's most memorable lines.

"#QDEP dad," accompanied by a broken heart, Hamill himself wrote on his social media accounts on Monday.