Tommy Lee Jones

Sep 16, 1946

San Saba, Texas, USA

Jones was born in San Saba, Texas to Clyde C. Jones, who worked in the oil fields of both Texas and Libya, and Lucille Marie Scott, who was a police officer and hairdresser who owned a beauty parlour; the two were married and divorced twice. Jones, an eighth-generation Texan, has a Cherokee Native American grandparent, and is mostly of Welsh ancestry. Jones was also a resident of Midland, Texas.
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Jones graduated the St. Mark's School of Texas and attended Harvard on a scholarship, wh... ... (read more...) ere he was a roommate of former Vice President Al Gore and of John Lithgow at Dunster House. Jones played offensive tackle on Harvard's undefeated 1968 varsity football team, was nominated as a first-team All-Ivy League selection, and played in the memorable and literal last-minute Harvard sixteen-point comeback blitz to tie Yale in the 1968 Game.
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Jones then moved to New York City to become an actor. He started acting on Broadway and in television. He made his debut in movies in Love Story, in 1970 (Erich Segal, the author of "Love Story" has said that he based the lead character of Oliver on the two undergrad roommates he knew while teaching at Harvard, Jones and Al Gore). Between 1971 and 1975, he portrayed Dr. Mark Toland on the ABC soap opera, One Life to Live, and then he played the role of an escaped convict who was hunted down by the police in Jackson County Jail (1976). In 1981, he played a drifter opposite Sally Field in Back Roads, a comedy that received middling reviews and grossed $11 million at the box office.

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.
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In the 1990s, movies such as The Fugitive costarring Harrison Ford and Men in Black with Will Smith brought him tens of millions of dollars and made him one of the top actors of Hollywood. His role in The Fugitive won him wide acclaim and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

In 2005, he released his first feature-film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, that was presented at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. It won him the Best Actor Award. His first film as director was in 1995, a made-for-television movie.