Tommy Lee Jones

Season 3, Episode 306

Original Airdate: March 26, 1997

Born September 15, 1946 in West Texas town of San Saba, Tommy Lee Jones was the only child of an oil worker father and a policewoman/beauty parlor owner mother. He had a troubled homelife with physical abuse at the hands of his father, and parents who divorced and then remarried.

To escape, Jones turned to that revered Texas pastime, football. When his father accepted a job on a Libyan oil rig, Jones was so determined to stay in Texas that he won a football scholarship to an elite prep school in Dallas. He discovered acting there and appeared in a student production of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. He also emerged an excellent student and a star offensive lineman.

Football led him to a scholarship to Harvard University. His roommate was a young man from Tennessee, future Vice President Al Gore. At Harvard, Jones continued to act, appearing in productions of Shakespeare, and still excelled on the football field. He played in one of the schools' most famous football games, a 29-29 tie with Yale, which left the team with its first undefeated season since 1920. (16 of those points were scored in the last 42 seconds of the game!) Jones considers the video of that game as “one of the best films I've ever appeared in.”

Even though he was All-American, and named to All-Ivy, and All-East teams, the lanky athlete was too small to make it in the pros. Jones instead moved to New York to work on a career as an actor, and landed his first role in a Broadway show just ten days after arriving in the city.

For the next several years, he continued to find work in theater and on television. In the early 70s, he played Dr. Mark Toland on ABC's soap opera One Life To Live. He landed his big-screen debut in 1970 with Love Story (based on the novel by another Harvard alum, Erich Segal.)

But as the theater roles fell off, Jones moved to Los Angeles in 1975. The move provided just the career jump-start he needed. Jones was cast in the pilot episode of Charlie's Angels, and won his first starring role in a feature film, Jackson County Jail (in which he portrayed an escaped convict on the run from federal marshals.) In 1983, he won an Emmy for playing a murderer in the TV movie, The Executioner's Song. Although Jones had no trouble getting critical recognition for his work he was still relatively unknown by the public.