Tommy Lee Jones

Early life and education

Tommy Lee Jones was born on September 15, 1946, in San Saba, Texas, to Lucille Marie Jones, a police officer, schoolteacher, and beauty shop owner, and Clyde C. Jones, a cowboy and oil field worker. His parents married and divorced twice. He is of Cherokee descent. Raised in Midland, Texas, he attended Midland Lee High School before moving to Dallas and graduating from the St. Mark's School of Texas in 1965 on scholarship.

Jones entered Harvard College in 1965 on need-based aid, living in Dunster House as an upperclassman and rooming with future U.S. vice president Al Gore and Bob Somerby. He majored in English literature, studied under dramatist Robert Chapman, and graduated cum laude in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts degree; his senior thesis examined the mechanics of Catholicism in Flannery O'Connor's works. Jones played guard on the Harvard Crimson football team from 1965 to 1968, was a first-team All-Ivy League selection, and played in the 1968 Game, a memorable 16-point comeback tie against Yale.

Career

After graduating from Harvard in 1969, Jones moved to New York City and made his Broadway debut that year in A Patriot for Me. His first film role came in 1970, playing a Harvard student in Love Story. He returned to Broadway in 1971 for Four on a Garden with Carol Channing and Sid Caesar. From 1971 to 1975, he portrayed Dr. Mark Toland on the soap opera One Life to Live.

In 1974, he played Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses in Nighttown opposite Zero Mostel. He played the lead in the TV movie The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977). His film roles in the 1970s included a hunted escaped convict in Jackson County Jail (1976), a Vietnam veteran in Rolling Thunder (1977), an automobile mogul in The Betsy (1978), and a police detective in Eyes of Laura Mars (1978). He co-starred with Sally Field in Back Roads (1981) and with Tuesday Weld in The Rainmaker (1982).

He won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1983 for his performance as murderer Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song. That year he also starred as pirate captain Bully Hayes in Nate and Hayes. In 1986, he played a former thief in Black Moon Rising. He co-starred in the TV film April Morning (1988) and earned a second Emmy nomination for portraying Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call in the miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989).

Personal life

Jones married actress Kate Lardner, niece of Ring Lardner Jr., in 1971; they divorced in 1978. His second marriage to Kimberlea Cloughley, daughter of former San Antonio mayor Phil Hardberger, produced two children, Austin and Victoria. He married photographer Dawn Laurel on March 19, 2001. He lives in Terrell Hills, Texas, and owns a 3,000-acre cattle ranch in San Saba County and a ranch near Van Horn, Texas, used as the set for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005).

Until 2019, he owned an equestrian estate in Wellington, Florida. A polo player, he has a house at the Santa Maria Polo Club in Buenos Aires, Argentina, supports the Harvard Polo Club, and is a member of the Polo Training Foundation. He is an avid San Antonio Spurs fan and gave the nominating speech for his former college roommate Al Gore at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. On January 1, 2026, his daughter Victoria was found dead in a San Francisco hotel from an apparent drug overdose at age 34; she had struggled with drug and alcohol use and had been involuntarily held at a hospital in Greenbrae, California, in August 2023. Jones successfully petitioned for a conservatorship but later asked the court to dismiss the matter.