Remembering Actor James Earl Jones
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James Earl Jones gave voice to one of the most iconic and recognizable characters in film history, giving a deep resonant quality and menacing tone as Darth Vader in Star Wars. If you only knew the power of the dark side. The demanding and sinister Mufasa in The Lion King. Look inside yourself, Simba. You are more than what you have become.

And for a time, he read the promos for a new cable news network. This is CNN. James Earl Jones died Monday at the age of 93. He got his start in the 1950s in theater, which remained his first love.

He returned to the stage throughout his career, playing Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. He earned a Tony Award for his performance in August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences, playing an embittered father talking to his son. Let's get this straight right now. We'll go long and further. I ain't got to like you. Mr. Rand, don't give me my money come payday because he like me. He give me because he owe me. Now, I didn't give you everything I had to give you.

I gave you your life. Your mama and me worked it out between us. And lacking your black ass was not a part of the bargain. And don't you try and go through life worried if somebody like you or not. You best make sure that they are doing right by you.

Jones won his first Tony for his performance in The Great White Hope as the first black boxing champ. His performance in the film version earned him an Oscar nomination and helped make him a star. Here he is as the boxer talking with reporters. One more question. Yeah, go ahead. Now, you're the first black man in the history of the ring who's ever had a crack at the heavyweight title. Now, white folks, of course, are behind Brady. I mean, he's the redeemer of the race and so on. But you, Jack Jefferson...

Are you the Black Hope? Well, I'm Black and I'm hoping. Answer him straight, yeah. Say, look, man, I ain't fighting for no race. I ain't redeeming nobody. My mama told me Mr. Lincoln done that. Ain't that why you shot him? James Earl Jones was prolific in television and film. He made over 70 TV appearances and was one of the first Black actors to have a reoccurring role on the daytime soaps.

His over 100 film credits included John Sayles' Meidwan. Both coming to America comedies, the South African drama Cry the Beloved Country and Field of Dreams, in which he played a writer summoned to an Iowa baseball field. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball...

has marked the time. This field, this game, it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh, people will come, Ray. Jones received an honorary Oscar in 2011. And in 2022, the Court Theater on Broadway was renamed the James Earl Jones Theater.

Terry Gross spoke with Jones in 1993 when he had published his memoir, Voices and Silences. He was born in rural Mississippi and was raised by his grandparents. But when he was a child, they moved to rural Michigan, and he says that uprooting caused his debilitating stutter. Between the ages of 6 and 14, he barely spoke at all. I did the basics. I was able to function as a farm kid,

doing all those chores where you call animals. And I think I had my best conversations with the dog, who was a good friend of mine and didn't challenge me in any way. And I certainly let the family know what my needs were. But when strangers came to the house, the mute happened. I didn't want to confront them. I wasn't ready. I hid in the state of mutinies.

Why, I mean, did you not want to speak or did you feel physically unable to speak? It was just too embarrassing. Because of the stutter? Too difficult, yeah. Can you tell us a story of how you started speaking again? Donald Crouch was an associate of... Donald Crouch was your teacher? Yeah, Robert Frost. He was a college professor, but he ended up in this high school because he retired. He was a Mennonite farmer and he retired to his farm in Brethren, Michigan.

And the idea that there were kids down the road at this high school who were studying Chaucer and Shakespeare and stuff, he couldn't stand it. So he came back and taught high school, you know. And he was the first English teacher I had. Now, see, I'm stuttering again. He was the first English teacher I had. And he accepted that I wasn't verbal, that I wasn't oral. But he didn't like the idea that I could...

privately, subjectively, enjoy poetry and not sound it out loud. He one day discovered that I wrote poetry, and he said to me, this poem is so good, I don't think you really wrote it. I think you plagiarized it, which was a shock to me. I could admit that it was Longfellow-esque, but it was not certainly stolen from Longfellow. He said, the way you can prove it to me that you wrote it was to get up in front of the class and recite it by heart. And I accepted the challenge and did it, and we both

We realized then we had a means, we had a way of regaining the power of speech through reading poetry. What was it about having words written down for you that made it easier for you to speak? Not that they were written down, but they're rhythmic. I think you'll find many stutterers today. I'm trying to think of the country western singer who was a stutterer, but does not stutter when he sings. But there are many, many cases like Mel Tillett's. Thank you. Thank you, Mel Tillett's.

And there are many cases like that, actors, singers who don't have that problem when they are performing, walk off stage and you can't understand a word they're saying. It has to do with the rhythm. Rhythm carries us through. It does not, it smooths out those areas that allow the log jamming and the...

the stuttering to be triggered. So does the stutter come back very much for you? You've heard it several times now. It's always with me, you know, and I have to be careful not to talk too fast. It certainly becomes a problem whenever I do something emotional, whether in real life or as an actor. I hear it in emotional speech, whether it's positive emotion or negative, joy or pain, and that often leads to overload, and I have to be very careful.

There was a time when my acting was affected by it. I think Gladys Vaughn was the first to notice it. She said, when you get emotional, when your Othello, for instance, gets emotional, I sometimes believe you less. And it's because I'm being too careful. You can't measure out emotion. It has a flow. Has your Othello ever stuttered? No. None of my characters have ever stuttered except for the very first thing I did on Broadway. I played the role of Edward, FDR's...

ballet as a young man. And I had the line, Mrs. Roosevelt, supper is served. And I got hung on the mama word. And

It is funny, isn't it? Because it's so ridiculous. Mary Thicket, who was playing Eleanor Roosevelt, was very patient. She just stood there and let me get through it. She knew the audience knew that something was wrong.

But she didn't want to embarrass me any further by saying my line for me. Right. So she let me have my moment. I got through it. And it's never happened since. What was it like in your early days as an actor before you had the reputation, before you were James Earl Jones?

And you'd go and talk to a casting director and you'd be stuttering when talking to them and then you'd have to somehow convince them that on stage you were going to be fine. I mean, casting directors, I'm sure, are pretty insecure about that kind of thing. No, there was never a problem. I don't know why, but it never was. Besides, Marlon Brando and all the method actors had made stuttering a part of the way Americans talk. Oh, a part of like emotional truth that you're grasping so hard for that truth. Yeah.

Yeah. Could you give us a sense of the kinds of exercises or the type of training that you had that helped you find the power in your voice? Because you have a very powerful voice. Oh, the exercises were, I got to move back a bit. Okay. Hog calling, cattle calling.

That's something you did on the farm without having to go to a voice. My dad always said that the reason he became an actor was because even in grade school, and he didn't have a whole lot of it, but even in grade school, he was the loudest kid in class. From Culling the Animals. So he was destined to be an actor. And that's kind of true, though. Farm kids are never told, hush, you wake the neighbors.

Farm kids are told, use your voice to get those cows in here. So you think you developed that power on the farm long before acting class? Yeah, and also it is also genetic. I inherited whatever resonating chambers my father possesses. They're not too dissimilar from Paul Robeson and another actor of my generation, Jeffrey Holder. So when the Darth Vader voice became a mystery, as many people thought it was Jeffrey Holder as who thought it was me.

And that has to do with just how a voice is produced, you know, how it, you know,

How it resonates in the head and everything. Yeah, in the head and in the body. I think some of the advice that your voice teacher gave you was to not use the full power of your voice, just to save some of it in reserve. Well, that's just good acting. Once you take your character to the limit, the audience can tell that he has no more. There's nothing in reserve, and they get less interested. There's less suspense involved.

about what you're going to do next, you know? Your father was an actor. He was a boxer first, then he became an actor. But it sounds like your family wasn't really proud of that. I mean, you were raised by your grandparents. They didn't seem at all proud of that. I think they would have been proud. They became later proud of Joe Louis.

I think my grandfather was secretly proud of Jack Johnson as he was of Satchel Paige, the baseball player. What about the acting part of his career? It sounds like you're... What I'm getting at is they just didn't understand it. Right. It was hard enough for them to understand a prizefighter making a real honest living, much less an attributor actor. I mean, that was just not within the comprehension. These are people who we got our life from the soil.

And I'm very proud of that, that I had that... I shared that kind of life with them. But they had no way of understanding Robert Earl. Right. And were very intolerant of him and very resistant to my ever meeting him. I didn't get to meet him until I was 21, until I was legal age. And my mother was a part of that, too. It was a very bad marriage, which I tried to explain in the book and tried to show both sides. I guess that's part of the reason why you ended up being brought up by your grandparents. Oh, that was... Yeah, that was the reason. They...

My mother wanted to be a single mother, but my grandmother knew better that during the Depression it was hard enough for her to, a 20-year-old girl, to manage her own life. And she insisted that she found a way to adopt me. In your memoir, Voices and Silences, you devote a total of about a paragraph to Star Wars, to your voice as Darth Vader. And I got the impression that...

It's not something you really want to call that much attention to. Are you kidding? Not true. It's just that I have very little to talk about. Had I been one of the actors and given points, I would not only be wealthy, I'd be probably much better known. You got a flat fee? Oh, yeah. I think George Lucas, first of all, realized that although David Prowse was the actor he wanted, it was not the sound he wanted.

So he sussed around for a technically and symbolically a darker voice. He eventually came to me and said to Lucy, would you any like to earn a day's salary? The job took two and a half hours. They paid me all of $9,000, which was not bad for two and a half hours of work. None of us knew what we had. And that was fine.

Almost not out of embarrassment, but out of his traditionally... His non-traditional traditional capitalism, or lack of capitalism, George gave me a Christmas bonus that amounted to the same amount of money. But I was just acting as special effects. That's all that was. At the same time, I was having done...

the Great White Hope film, I'd become a member of the board of directors of the Oscar board, you know, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, at a time when the controversy over whether Mercedes McCambridge deserved credit for contributions to Linda Blair's voice, the devil, the devil coming out. In The Exorcist. Yeah, in The Exorcist. And I thought there was a silly argument

I said to myself that all the Mercedes is special effects. And I wanted to keep that clear in my case, so I didn't even take credit for the voice of Darth Vader. Forgive me, I know this is a small part of your career, but I have to ask you about the CNN voice. The first time someone said to me, you know, I think that's James Earl Jones, I said, nah. There's no way they were right. Of course, everybody knows this now, that you do the voice of CNN voice.

Why did you decide to take that on when you were offered it? Oh, you asked me what the Star Wars involvement meant to me. What it did, it made my voice...

viable in the commercial world. But I don't know why, really, I avoided that great way to make a living and great craft unto itself. But the Star Wars sort of put my name on the A-list, as they say out there, for authoritative voices.

So your attitude was, why not take advantage of it? My attitude? Yeah. Oh, exactly. Yeah. I mean, why kick something that's going to sit on your lap out of the house? I think the first commercials I did, I did one for Chrysler and one for Goodyear and one for Fisher Audio Products. And they asked me to just give us the sound of God.

Goodyear Vector tires, you know. Let God sell Goodyear Vector tires. No problem. They were not embarrassed about saying that. So do you have a voice of yours that you think of the voice of God? No, no. It's just to sound as, let it go as bass as it can go and still be clear. Yeah. And to sound like I mean it. There's not a product I've ever promoted that I don't use, including Goodyear.

Wells Lamont gloves, working man's gloves. Of course, the yellow pages. And Ruben's dinners out in Ruben's chain of restaurants. Orson Welles and Vincent Price and I were once asked to simply, on a recording, read the menu with as much slobbering, lustful sounds as we can conjure.

And we got paid for it. When you were getting started as an actor in, was it the 50s or the 60s that we're talking about? It was the 50s. 50s, yeah. Was it hard for you as an African-American actor to find roles? I laugh because I never want to contribute to the truth or the mythology about racism in this country in terms of the arts. There is some truth. My father warned me of that.

I think each generation gets better. But I don't want to lay the fault at the door of race. I think anybody who's as talented as, I'll name you two or three, Courtney Vance, Ross Whitaker, these young actors, anybody that talented, no matter how black they are, will never be denied long. The talent will break. Marlon Brando wasn't all that fancy a person.

kid from the Midwest, right? But there's no way to keep that talent from... I mean, Hollywood is a money-making machine. And if you get enough so-called black movies going and they make a lot of money...

you better believe Hollywood's going to be right there to hire those actors, as they are doing with Denzel Washington, in non-traditional ways, because it's called box office. I think you're being very modest here, but really, when you started acting, you weren't... I mean, careful not to discourage young black people from expressing themselves in artistic ways, because it's hard. It is hard. But Hollywood did not have the faith in African...

African Americans at the box office that they're starting to develop now. Hollywood didn't have faith in women, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans. It has no faith at all. It's not about faith. It's about habits, fads, spinoffs, sequels. Hollywood has some very bad habits, and a lot of them are racist.

But I don't want to discourage kids from going bashing at the doors. One quick, very quick last question. Have you ever been in a kind of difficult situation, either on the verge of being mugged or given a traffic ticket that you didn't want to pay or something where you used your big authoritative voice to intimidate the other person? Last time I was mugged, it was multiple muggings because my first visit to St. Louis, Missouri, I was mugged.

At the age of 14, I was mugged several times one afternoon before I figured out what was going on. And in those days, you didn't always get killed when you got mugged. You got surrounded by a bunch of kids that said, give me your money. I said, okay. Being a farm kid, you fight over a movie change? The idea of fighting didn't occur to me. So therefore, I was quite safe. The only time I've used the voice, though, in my adult life was when I got my first CB radio and I

I used the Darth Vader as my handle. Panicked a few people on the cross-country drive from New York to Los Angeles, and I've not done it since. That's very funny. James Earl Jones, I thank you so much for talking with us. It's really been a pleasure. Thank you immensely. Thank you. James Earl Jones speaking with Terry Gross in 1993. He died Monday at the age of 93.

Coming up, we also remember jazz guitarist Russell Malone and listen to his 2000 interview. And Justin Chang reviews the new film His Three Daughters. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.

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That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y dot com slash podcast. Easier said, done. Russell Malone is known as one of the leading guitarists of his generation. Before starting his group, he performed with singer and pianist Diana Krall and Harry Connick Jr. Malone died last month at 60, while on tour in Japan.

Self-taught, Malone started playing music at the age of four on what he described as a green four-string plastic guitar. He fell in love with jazz after watching George Benson perform on TV. At the time, Malone was just 12 years old. He was also influenced by gospel, blues, and R&B, country, pop tunes, and even cartoons.

By the time he graduated from high school, he was playing gigs around Atlanta. He started as a professional musician in 1988 when he went on tour with organist Jimmy Smith. Pianist Bill Charlap, who played with Malone, said, He was an absolute natural musician. He had perfect time and rhythm, and you heard the whole history of jazz guitar and the way he played.

Russell Malone recorded 10 albums. Let's listen to a track from his album Sweet Georgia Peach. This is the title track. Terry Gross spoke with Russell Malone in 2000. Here's Malone singing and playing on the song Be Careful, It's My Heart. Be careful, it's my heart. It's not my watch you're holding.

It's my heart. It's not the note I sent you that you quickly burn. It's not the book I lent you that you never return. Be careful. It's my heart. Russell Malone from his recent CD, Look Who's Here. You strike me as somebody with a big voice when you're speaking who's singing in a much quieter voice.

So what reaction have you been getting? You know what? A lot of people really like that song. They like my rendition of it. And I'm not a singer. I can carry a tune. I just sing the melody. And, you know, when you got a good song like that, you don't have to try to sell it. All you have to do is just sing it because, I mean, the lyrics are there. The melody is there. And, I mean, the harmony of the song is great. So all you have to do is just sing it.

A song you've recorded twice is Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, both solo guitar versions. Is that one of the songs you used to do in church? Yeah, in fact, I used to play it at funerals. I played it at my grandfather's funeral. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. So it's a song that really means a lot to you. It's a song that, well, all of those songs mean a lot to me. But that one in particular, it really, my heart aches when I hear it.

This is from your previous CD, which is called Sweet Georgia Peach. This is Russell Malone. Russell Malone from his CD, Sweet Georgia Peach, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. It's a beautiful version of that.

You primarily taught yourself to play guitar, so clearly you must have a very good ear, but what about things like fingerings? What about it? Did you learn that yourself? Did you just make that up yourself, or did you have people to suggest fingerings before? I just figured it out, but when you get older and you become more exposed to other players...

You find out what they're doing and you try to pick up what you can from them. You know, every time Jim Hall or George Vincent or somebody like that is playing, I always make a point of going to check them out. And if I'm lucky, sit down and watch them up close and try to walk away with something. Because nobody, I mean, there's only so much you can learn on your own. Were there any things that you figured out on your own that,

And then you met a more experienced guitarist and realized that there was a better way of going about it, a better way of fingering the chord or whatever, and you had to unlearn what you taught yourself and learn something new, which can be very difficult. Well, I'll give an example. I remember one time I was playing for Kenny Burrell. I picked up his guitar in the dressing room and I started playing some solo guitar.

And most guys, when they play solo guitar, they use the thumb. And when they play fingerstyle, they use the thumb and the three or four fingers on the right hand. Now, I was playing with a thumb and the index finger. Now, that may seem crude or wrong to somebody.

But the music came out right. And Kenny Burrell said, hey, man, that's a very unique way of approaching that style. George Benson, he saw me doing the same thing. He said, that's really weird, but it sounds so good. So there's no right or wrong way to do anything as long as the music comes out right. That's the bottom line. Dizzy Gillespie played wrong, technically. I mean, you didn't see any trumpet players playing with all that air in their cheeks. Wes Montgomery used a thumb.

when most guys were using a pick, but Wes Montgomery got around that guitar just as well as the guys that were using a pick. So does that make it wrong? No. The important thing is the music. Guitarist Russell Malone speaking with Terry Gross in 2000. We'll hear more after a short break. This is Fresh Air.

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You have a great story about the first time you sat in with the organist Jimmy Smith when you were still pretty young. Would you tell that story for us? Well, he was playing at a place called Pasco's La Carousel in Atlanta. This was back in 1986. And I had been listening to Jimmy since I was knee-high to a grass opera, so I knew his music. And I got off my gig at the Holiday Inn and drove down to the club to see him play.

Before he got on the bandstand, I mean, the way he walked around the club, the way he approached the bandstand, I mean, he just had this aura about him. I mean, they're just certain guys. When they're away from their instruments, they're still swinging. They have this charisma. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Milt Jackson was like that. Even when he was away from that bandstand, he was just still grooving, man. And that's the way Jimmy Smith was. But anyway, when he got on the bandstand, he was just like,

He played beautifully. And then he closed out the set, went over to the bar, and he was talking with this saxophone player, one of the local guys, a fellow by the name of Phil Austin. And so Phil introduced me to Jimmy and said, hey, you know, this is Russell Malone, a fine up-and-coming young guitarist. He said, oh, yeah? He said, you got your guitar? I said, yes, it's in the car. So he made me go get my guitar. And I...

came back and he played one or two tunes and then he called me up to sit in with the band. And I had some of my buddies there with me and I had my girlfriend at the time with me. So I'm feeling really good. And everybody was excited because here's the hometown kid getting a chance to sit in with the great Jimmy Smith. So he kicked off the first tune, which was a blues, and I'm feeling all good about myself and I'm playing all of this crowd-pleasing nonsense that didn't have any

And the crowd went wild, and, you know, I'm catting up there, feeling good. So Jimmy's sitting back, and he's paying attention to all of this. So he ended the tune. Then he went into a ballad, which I didn't know, a tune called Laura by David Raskin. You know that tune? I do, and it's a haunting melody, but it's also, it doesn't have predictable...

It doesn't have a predictable melody line or chords. See, that's the thing. See, that's not one of those tunes that you can just hear your way through. You have to really know that song. It's the theme from the movie, by the way. Yeah. Yeah, for listeners who don't know it. Yeah. So you have to really know that song. So he plays the melody, and I'm here. I'm there trying to hear what he's doing. And then...

After he finishes the melody, he motions for me to take the first solo. And the harder I struggle with the tune, the more complicated he made it for me because he started throwing in all of these different substitutions and changes and started doing tricks with the rhythm. And I was really embarrassed. I was mortified.

So he ended the song and he says, yeah, it's Russell Malone on guitar. So I got off the bandstand, my spirit dragging, sat back down next to my girlfriend. And he looked over at me and said on the mic, he says, now, whenever youngsters sit in with us, we always like to make sure that they learn something. And he looked at me and said, now, did you learn something, young man? And I said, yes, yes. So anyway, he played one more tune, ended the set, went back over to the bar. And he's, you know, having a drink with some friends.

So I was so embarrassed I was going to leave, but I figured I better stay around and thank him for the opportunity. So I walked up to him, and I was about to say, Mr. Smith, thank you for letting me sit in. But before I could get the sentence out of my mouth, he looked around and he said something to me, and I will never forget this as long as I live. He looked at me and poked his finger in my chest and said, let me tell you something. He said, all those guys that you're trying to play like,

George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, Pat Martino. He gave me this long list of guitar players. He said, all of these guys that you're trying to play like, I knew them and I taught them too. And I never forgot that. So anyway, I stayed around. I didn't leave. I stayed around until...

The last set was over. And then we went up to his dressing room at around midnight and we hung out there till like 630 the next morning. I had my guitar with me and I was playing for him. And he, you know, when you get I don't know if you've ever met Jimmy Smith, but Jimmy is an interesting guy. He's he's a bit of a character. And when there are a lot of people around, he tends to put on this act of.

You ever seen people like that? When they have an audience, they put on this act. But when it was just the two of us one-on-one, I got so much information from this man. And, you know, it's funny. Whenever he would talk about Wes Montgomery and Bud Powell and Art Tatum and all of these people, he would get very emotional. You could see the tears welling up in his eyes. One of the things I really like about this story is that after he kind of makes a point of putting you in your place on the bandstand...

Then you become buddies, you know, like within an hour of that or an hour or two, you know, and you stay up all night together. He's teaching all these things. It's like he showed you up, but he really apparently did mean well. That's what you call, that's a perfect example of tough love. You know, tough love. It's just like, you know, here I was this cocky kid and I made the mistake of, and this was a very foolish mistake, of thinking that just because I had heard

I'd listened to his records and I'd, you know, learned some of the solos or whatever, learned some of his songs. I thought that that's the way it was going to be. But I was in for a rude awakening. What are some of the musicians or some of the recordings you've listened to over the years that are quite a distance away from what you actually play, but you love what they do and it's influenced you in some way or another? You mean aside from jazz? Yeah.

Yeah, or even within jazz. Things that we might be surprised that you really like and feel very strongly about. Well, I like a lot of different things, Terry. There's one record that I've been listening to called New Moonshine by James Taylor. It came out about nine years ago, which is a great record. Is the singer-songwriter James Taylor? James Taylor, yeah. Fire and Rain, James Taylor. Right, right. What do you hear in him?

Well, James Taylor, he's got honesty, man. I mean, he's got the passion, and he writes great songs. The man writes good songs. Jim Croce I like. I love Jim Croce. I like Patsy Cline. I like Sam Cooke as far as jazz goes. Let's see. One of my favorite records is a record that was recorded by Oscar Peterson and Milt Jackson and Ray Brown years ago called Very Tall. Great record. I listen to a lot of different things, Terry. I'd be here all day telling you about what I listen to.

You have a song that you do on your previous CD, the Sweet Georgia Peach CD, called Someone's Rockin' My Dreamboat. Mm-hmm. I've never heard of that song before. Where did you find it? You're not going to believe it when I tell you this. Are you ready for this? Yeah. Are you sure you're ready for this, Terry? I'm sitting down. Okay. Bugs Bunny. I kid you not. Okay.

Would you sing it in a cartoon? Because Bugs is the great vaudevillian of the Warner Brothers cartoons. You watch some of those old cartoons, and there are a lot of great songs in there. But this one day, I was watching Bugs Bunny.

And he was skipping through the forest singing this song. Someone's rocking my dream boat. Someone's invading my dream. We were sailing along and singing this song and suddenly something went wrong. And I was just so taken by the melody. And so I said, I got to find this tune. So I found a recording of the Ink Spots doing it. Remember the Ink Spots? Sure do. If I didn't care. Yeah.

And would I be sure that this is love, Bianca, I'm here. Would all this be true if I didn't care for you? Anyway, so much for that. No, but the Ink Spots, I have a recording of the Ink Spots doing that tune, and I had to record it. I should play that again. I haven't played it in a while. Oh, it's a great song. It's great. One extreme to another, Bugs Bunny to the Ink Spots. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Bugs Bunny. That's where I first heard that tune.

Yeah, well, I think it's only fitting that we end with someone's rocking my dream boat. Russell Malone, it's been great to talk with you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Terry. That's Russell Malone. He spoke to Terry Gross in 2000. He died late last month. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film His Three Daughters. This is Fresh Air.

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In the movie, his three daughters, Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne, play sisters who've gathered at their father's bedside during his final days. It's the latest from Azazel Jacobs, the writer and director of earlier independent dramas Mama's Man and French Exit. It's now playing in theaters and begins streaming September 20th on Netflix. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.

Over the years, I've seen more than my share of dysfunctional family movies and terminal illness movies. And even the good ones have trouble sidestepping cliches. So it says something that His Three Daughters, which is about a dysfunctional family coping with a terminal illness, doesn't feel like a retread. The writer-director Azizel Jacobs has a knack for putting a fresh, intelligent spin on familiar material.

From the high school misfit comedy, Terry, to the playful marital drama, The Lovers. His latest, His Three Daughters, is a sharply written and beautifully modulated chamber piece, set over a few days inside a lower Manhattan apartment, where three women have gathered to bid farewell to their father, Vincent, who's in hospice care. Carrie Coon plays Katie, the oldest of the three sisters.

She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and teenage daughter, but she hasn't been around to visit her dad much lately. Elizabeth Olsen plays the youngest, Christina, who's flown in from her home thousands of miles away. And then there's Rachel. That's Natasha Lyonne. She lives with Vincent in this apartment and has been looking after him for some time. Rachel is estranged from her two sisters for reasons that aren't initially clear.

Jacobs drops us right into the thick of the tension, then gradually fills in the larger picture. Some of the friction stems from the fact that Katie and Christina are essentially outsiders on Rachel's turf. Rachel can claim some moral high ground, since she's been taking care of their dad while they've been busy living their lives and raising families of their own.

Adding to the two against one dynamic is the fact that Rachel isn't biologically related to her sisters or their father. After Vincent's first wife died, he married Rachel's mom and raised Rachel as his own. As Rachel makes needlessly clear to her sisters, she's no less his daughter than they are. There are money and class issues too. Katie looks down on Rachel, claiming all she does is smoke weed all day and make money through sports gambling.

And then there's the matter of real estate. In this contentious conversation, Katie insinuates that Rachel has been taking care of Vincent partly because of her enviable living situation. From the beginning, I've understood I was in your place. It's your place, too.

I know it, you know it. But you live here. You were on the lease. That's the second time you mention this lease. What is that? What are you trying to say? And you brought it up too, outside. So what's up with this? Nothing, just the fact. When he dies, this becomes your place. And you think that's what I want, that I give a s*** about the place? Sorry. Let's just keep our voices down. We need to be able to hear his room.

Okay? I don't think either of us are trying to imply anything other than what's understood. Understood? Come on, Rachel. Of course you care about him. But this place is a good deal. Let's be truthful about it. Nobody has rent like this in the city. I mean, just about. It doesn't exist. This is good. I'm happy for you. I want you to have it. In this and every other scene, the acting and the writing have such specificity that you feel you know these characters intimately.

Few actors can make anger more mesmerizing than Carrie Coon, and her Katie is testy and judgmental, even, or especially, when she tries to seem reasonable. It's hard not to side a lot of the time with Natasha Lyonne's Rachel, who lets the expletives fly as she pushes back defensively against Katie's insinuations. That leaves Christina in the tough role of peacemaker,

She's earnest and open-hearted by nature, something that comes out when she describes her deadhead past. In Elizabeth Olsen's quietly moving performance, we see a woman who often suppresses her feelings to spare those of others. What distinguishes His Three Daughters from so many movies of its type is that while it's certainly talky, it never feels as if the characters are trying to explain themselves to you.

Rather than coughing up large chunks of backstory, their interactions have the pull of honest, free-flowing conversation. Much of the dialogue is taken up with the practical and wholly relatable end-of-life details. The difficulties of writing an obituary, or arranging a do-not-resuscitate order, or even dealing with a well-meaning but slightly exasperating hospice care worker.

I haven't seen many movies that so acutely understand the role food plays in a situation like this, where the act of cooking meals for your family, or making sure there's always fresh coffee, can be both a drag and a welcome distraction. Vincent himself is off-camera for most of the movie, sleeping quietly in his room, though Jacobs wisely gives him, and J.O. Sanders, the actor playing him, a beautiful moment in the film's last act.

The question hanging over his three daughters is whether the sisters will overcome their estrangement and remain family after Vincent's gone. Jacobs doesn't force a resolution, though he does end on a note of hard-won understanding that I found both optimistic and deeply affecting. He's made a movie that, in the shadow of death, says something essential about how we live.

Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed His Three Daughters.

On Monday's show, award-winning actor Demi Moore. She stars in the new horror film The Substance as an aging actress who uses a black market drug to create a younger, better version of herself, at least temporarily. Moore says she took the role because she was fascinated with the internal horrors many women in midlife silently deal with in their quest to remain youthful. I hope you can join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Herzfeld, and Al Banks. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers. And we're here to help you get started.

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