Roles such as Mufasa in Disney’s ‘The Lion King’ established Jones as one of the most recognizable voices in film. In 2011, he received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

Over the years, the actor has spoken at length about how learning to deal with his stutter has helped him land some of the biggest roles in the film industry.

In 2010, Jones told the Daily Mail how difficult it was for his classmates to stutter: “Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I would try to read my lessons and the children behind me would fall on the floor laughing.”

He first developed a stutter when he moved from Mississippi to Michigan in 1936 at the age of five to live with his grandparents.

In 1996, he told the Academy of Achievement that his stuttering worsened and he was unable to speak for nearly ten years.

“When I got to Michigan, I stuttered. I couldn’t talk. So my freshman year of school was my first stupid year, and those stupid years continued until I got to high school,” Jones said.

He added: “I still stutter. But we all find a way to mask it. And sometimes, I think, our vocabulary is maybe a little bit bigger than normal, because we have to find a word that we don’t stumble over. A word that starts with the right consonant. I came to terms with it as a child.”

The actor made progress in high school thanks to his English teacher, Donald Crouch, who wondered whether Jones had plagiarized a poem or written it himself.

“He says, ‘This is a good poem. It’s so good; I don’t think you wrote it. To prove you wrote it, you go up in front of the class and say it out loud.’ And that was the moment,” Jones recalls.

“I don’t know if he came up with that challenge or not, but he really meant it. And I stood up and I said it without stuttering. Nice surprise.”