James Earl Jones, who has died aged 93, was a hugely successful and distinguished African-American star of stage and screen, an ego titan and a great interpreter of classic and modern roles from Shakespeare to Eugene O’Neill and August Wilson. The way he looked – majestic, masculine, domineering – was, of course, a key to his success.

But it was his sound that made him a legend. That great rumbling basso profundo was like a thunderstorm crossing the horizon, an almost supernatural voice of wisdom and power, making generations of moviegoers from the 70s to the 90s tremble in the presence of a father figure, good and bad.

He was the voice of Darth Vader in the first Star Wars trilogy, when he informed Luke Skywalker of something intimately terrible – I will never forget that voice, delivering that devastating news – and then he was the voice of Mufasa, father of prince Simba in the great Disney animated film The Lion King, whose death is engineered by his evil brother Scar and for which Simba feels wrongly, tragically guilty. Jones’ sonorous voice lent a dignity and a kind of benign innocence to Mufasa’s speech, as he explained to the wide-eyed Simba his royal responsibility to the great chain of being: “Everything you see exists together in a delicate balance. As king, you must understand that balance and respect all creatures, from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope …”

That voice didn’t come out of nowhere. It was an ornamentation of Jones’ classical training and talent, and like Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte or Paul Robeson, he was an African-American actor with a beautiful voice that was the key to his dignity and self-respect as an artist; it was how his characters rose above racism and brutality.

In the flesh, Jones’s presence lent itself to roles that combined wisdom with humility and a certain self-denial—a paradox, given what a powerful force he always was. Perhaps typical of Jones’s late-period acting, and one that matched the thoughtfulness and depth of his stage roles, was his coal miner, “Few Clothes” Johnson, in John Sayles’s social-realist drama Matewan (1987), about the 1920s strike in Matewan, West Virginia: a strong, clear-eyed moral presence. In Darrell Roodt’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1995), a new film version of Alan Paton’s novel, set in apartheid South Africa and produced to celebrate the new presidency of Nelson Mandela, Jones was the troubled clergyman Stephen Kumalo who discovers his son has been arrested for the murder of a white man.

Jones made his film debut as Bombardier Zogg in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), in which he pilots the plane that is to deliver the deadly cargo. He is a younger man with a lighter, less assertive voice, of course, but he has the necessary gravity for such a terrible, ironic responsibility.

His first Oscar nomination (and Golden Globe for best newcomer) came for what was perhaps his most belligerently assertive role, The Great White Hope (1970), which he had also played on Broadway, opposite Jane Alexander. Jones plays the all-conquering boxer Jack Jefferson (based on Jack Johnson) whose success enrages racists who yearn for a “white hope” to defeat him in the ring but realize he can be defeated outside the ring by magnifying the supposed scandal of his affair with a white woman. It was a fierce, sensual performance, far removed from the quiet calm of his later, more characteristic work, a role that befitted his real radical passion.

Jones, incidentally, was at the forefront of the debate over authentic casting when he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972 to condemn Anthony Quinn’s plans to portray Haitian Emperor Henri Christophe in blackface. Jones’ objection, though mildly voiced, caused such an uproar that Quinn was forced to leave the project and lose his personal investment of half a million dollars.

Jones entered the blaxploitation vein of indie cinema with John Berry’s musical comedy Claudine (1974), for which he also received a Golden Globe nomination. He plays Roop Marshall, a garbage man who falls for Claudine, played by Diahann Carroll, a single mother of six living on welfare. Her children, and perhaps the audience as well, may suspect that Roop—a good-natured but slightly bewildered man who hasn’t fully acknowledged his existing domestic responsibilities—will in fact be her seventh dependent.

In Phil Alden Robinson’s baseball classic Field Of Dreams (1989), Jones is the Salinger-esque, reclusive author Terence Mann, who is persuaded to attend a game. In the Jack Ryan films, he played another granite authority figure, Admiral James Greer. Comedy was not exactly Jones’s strong suit, but he did a dry job of playing the King of Zamunda, father of Eddie Murphy’s prince, in 1988’s Coming to America . He also brought some paternal and grandfatherly fun to the coming-of-age comedy The Sandlot (1993), loosely inspired by Field Of Dreams, playing another reclusive grouch who makes the local kids nervous.

And above and below all these successes are his “voice of God” moments—silly, perhaps, but indicative of his love of performing, his direct connection with the audience, who took it for granted to love and respect him. James Earl Jones was movie royalty.