With James Earl Jones, there was always the voice. It rumbled. It poured over you, thick as molasses. It sounded regal, even when he was playing a humble ex-ballplayer instead of a king.
"Sesame Street," the King James Bible and "The Simpsons." In 2008, when he returned to Broadway to play Big Daddy in a revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," Jones was asked if the stage was an oasis ...