Tommy Lee Jones is the greatest actor of all time

Jones graduated from Harvard in 1969 with a BA in English, but he had been bitten by the acting bug. He moved to New York and booked a few Broadway gigs while working regularly on the ABC soap opera "One Life to Live." After impressing as a disillusioned escaped convict in the prison exploitation film "Jackson County Jail" produced by Roger Corman, Jones landed the role of Vietnamese veteran Johnny Vohden in John Flynn's cult actor "Rolling Thunder." /p>

Jones de Jones fits strongly as a former prisoner of war who failed to adapt to the post-Vietnam United States. Like many veterans, he keeps his despair and fury to himself. He is consumed by shame and aimless. So when his friend and former internee, Major Charles Rane (William Devane) asks for his help in getting revenge on the border town thugs who killed Rane's wife and child, Johnny doesn't hesitate to intervene. ."

Screenwriter Paul Schrader's dialogue for Johnny is terse. Most actors would have taken this as an invitation to portray Johnny as a deranged, dead-eyed warrior with a death wish. Jones, however, uses his chiseled features and sunken eyes to express deep sadness and, above all, a sense of shame. When Johnny tells a sex worker he's "gonna kill a bunch of people" before the climactic shooting at a Juarez brothel, his robotic delivery is a little depressing because, before that, Jones imbued this killer with a soul. . He made us mourn this spiritually adrift working-class Texan who was betrayed by his country. In some ways, we feel worse for Johnny than we do for Rane (who's close to being a fully-fledged psychopath at this point).

As he would repeatedly throughout his career, Jones finds the soft spots that lurk in a tough man, a man we'd like to understand and, perhaps, drink a beer with. Johnny may not be Jones' quintessential character, but he was the entry point to a career that would blossom quickly, albeit briefly.