Jones had become a father by then and continued to work steadily through the 1980s.

Chong remembers the first day she met Jones on the set of “Soul Man,” feeling intimidated as a girl who had grown up with “Star Wars.”

“The whole cast was a little bit afraid of him, not just because he was such a huge actor who was Othello in New York and his history,” Chong said. “But in fact he turned out to be a gentle giant, extremely generous. He’s very kind and gentle.”

Once Jones was in his 50s, past the sell-by date for the era’s leading actors, he played an impressive string of supporting roles, including roles in “Field of Dreams” (1987), “Matewan” (1987) and “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), a role he would reprise in two sequels.

Perhaps his most famous role of the decade — aside from “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” (1983), of course — was as Eddie Murphy’s father in the 1988 comedy “Coming to America.”

“You have to remember that ‘Coming to America’ was the greatest black film of its time,” Morales said. “It was the ‘Black Panther’ of the era.”

He also kept one foot on stage, winning his second Tony Award in 1987 for August Wilson’s “Fences” — a role Denzel Washington would reprise in a film version 29 years later.

In 1990, Jones was cast as the lead in the TV drama “Gabriel’s Fire,” the type of signature role that might have been better appreciated had the series aired on a premium cable network two decades later. At the time, however, TV executives deemed the material too dark and canceled the show after one season.

Show co-creator Jacqueline Zambrano recalls getting a call during a break in filming to talk to Jones about a script. In most cases, that meant the star would make diva-like demands for rewrites. “I sat down and immediately opened my notebook and I had my pen ready,” Zambrano said. “He started talking about a scene and asking me questions. Then we went to another scene and, you know, we talked as long as we could until they were ready for him on set.

“We both went away and I looked in my notebook and I didn’t have anything written down. He didn’t have any notes. He didn’t want to say to me, ‘I want to solve this.’ He just wanted to understand the text. He just wanted to understand the character better.”

Jones excelled enough in that limited time to win his first Emmy for Outstanding Primetime Actor. (He won a second Emmy that night for his supporting role in the TV movie “Heat Wave,” about the 1965 Watts race riots.)

In 1994, Jones lent his voice to the role of Mufasa in Disney’s animated film “The Lion King.” He would return in the live-action version 25 years later, the only actor from the original voice cast to return.

Jones continued to work continuously for the next three decades, even after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 1995. He received Emmy nominations for guest roles in “Picket Fences,” “Under One Roof,” “Frasier” and “Everwood,” among others. On Broadway, he earned two more Tony nominations, for a 2005 production of “On Golden Pond” and for a revival of Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man” seven years later.

In 2011, Jones received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement. That he never won an Oscar for a specific film role, missing out on the coveted EGOT, is a lasting symbol of how much he was underappreciated during a prolific and profound career.

Taylor, the UCLA professor, always includes a clip of Jones in the 1987 production of “Fences” in his acting master class.

“He was a huge presence, but such a fine, precise, attuned actor on stage,” Taylor said. “It was wonderful to watch him work.”