The Lone Ranger - Tommy Lee Jones

A thousand miles east of Hollywood and certainly a million miles away from his day job.....

By Karen Kranenburg. Photos by David Lominska and Getty Images.

It’s the type of terrain that most people only know from the movies, rugged mountains rising up off wide expanses of plains where cattle, cowboys, and an occasional dust devil are all that exist. In this stretch of West Texas towns are few and far between, and people even fewer, and the surrounding landscape could easily be straight off the set of a Hollywood Western, but this is no movie set, this is real life and one which actor Tommy Lee Jones is not only serious about but extremely passionate.

The 3,000 acre working ranch in San Saba, Texas is home to Jones and his family when he is not making movies or indulging in his other favourite past-time, playing polo. It’s ironic that in an industry where actors have to “learn” to play cowboy, Jones doesn’t have to, for the 62 year old actor who has been ranching for over 20 years says he’s got “cowboy” in his blood, but insists that being a rancher, has little to do with keeping it real from his life as a substantial player in the movie business. He manages to balance his acting career with ranching, which has always been in his family, seemingly with a similar amount of ease. “I actually like the movie business and work in it all year round, as well as ranching. One is not an antidote to the other, more a complement to the other, though acting is still what I like doing the most”.

Despite the importance of the movie business in his life, one gets the feeling that the ruggedly handsome Jones is still more at home in this remote part of the Lone Star State, than he is under the harsh lights of Tinseltown, and he is very resolute on the subject, “my neighbors in San Saba are like family. My celebrity doesn’t matter to them, so I prefer their company.” An eighth-generation Texan, he has a Cherokee Native American grandmother, but is mostly of Welsh ancestry, Jones is some-what of an enigma in Hollywood, where despite his tremendous success he has chosen not to embrace the whole “movie star” persona, with all of its attendant pitfalls.

Tenacious and talented, I don’t think even Jones could have written the script, for the life less ordinary which he has had. The journey started when he won a scholarship to the prestigious St. Mark’s School in Dallas where he first made a name for himself playing football. He subsequently went on to earn a scholarship to Harvard, where he received a B.A. in English Literature and graduated Cum Laude in 1969.A keen sportsman, he won All-East honors as an offensive lineman his senior year, and was a part of the legendary Harvard University team that beat Yale 29-29. Not only did the tie preserve the Crimson’s first undefeated season since 1920, but Harvard’s 16 points in the final 42 seconds are now the stuff of Ivy League legend. His college room-mate was former Vice-President Al Gore, and to this day they steadfastly maintain a close friendship. The two men are seemingly immortalised in celluloid, as according to author Erich Segal, he based the character of Oliver Barrett IV in Love Story on both Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones. Both of whom he knew when they were students at Harvard and he was a young professor. Close friends, Erich Segal got Tommy Lee Jones a small role in the movie, which when it was produced in 1970, won 11  of the 13 Oscars it was nominated for.

After his Harvard days, Jones’ initial ambition was to return to his native Texas to play football for the Dallas Cowboys, but his build was too slight for any professional team to recruit him, and so died his football dreams, instead he turned to acting which he had first discovered when he appeared in a student production of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.  After graduation Jones headed for New York and within 12 days of his arrival, had won a part in the Broadway play, A Patriot for Me. Though the production closed after only 49 performances, he worked steadily over the next few years and even appeared for several seasons on the  popular day-time soap opera, One Life to Live. His big break came though when he scored a prominent role on the ABC hit show, Charlie’s Angels, however the A-list was still not quite within his reach. But Jones, despite being a journeyman was an unusual talent, and as the years went on, the roles got bigger and better. He gained national recognition when he was cast in the title role in the TV miniseries The Amazing Howard Hughes (his resemblance to the title character, both vocally and visually, was positively uncanny). In 1982 he won further acclaim and an Emmy for his startling performance as serial killer Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song. He then spent the rest of the ‘80s working in both television and film, doing his most notable work on such TV miniseries as Lonesome Dove (1989), for which he earned an Emmy nomination.

It was however not until the early 90’s that the actor became a  major player in Hollywood, a position cemented by a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his role in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Two years later, Jones won both the Oscar and a Golden Globe for his determined and starkly funny portrayal of U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard in The Fugitive, where he starred opposite Harrison Ford. His subsequent work during this decade was prolific and enormously varied, part of his genius is that he has never been type-cast.  In 1994 alone, he could be seen as an insane prison warden in Natural Born Killers, titular baseball hero Ty Cobb in Cobb, a troubled army captain in Blue Sky, a wily federal attorney in The Client, and a psychotic bomber in Blown Away. He has worked with some of the brightest and best in Hollywood, from Clint Eastwood  &  Donald Sutherland (Space Cowboys), Sissy Spacek (Coal Miner’s Daughter) Susan Sarandon (The Client) & Cate Blanchett (The Missing) to name but a few, with performances that have drawn universal praise from critics and admiration from fans.  Jones has also been attached to a number of big-budget action movies, hamming it up as the crazed Two-Face in Batman Forever, a film which he said he did not enjoy making, and donning sunglasses and an attitude to play a special agent in the Men in Black series opposite Will Smith. Jones says “I do not have a sense of humor of any recognizable sort”, but his gritty portrayal as Will Smith’s side-kick in Men in Black belies this.

Most recently the actor was also nominated for another Oscar for his turn as the worried dad of an American soldier In the Valley of Elah (2007) this nomination was his first for a leading role. He also played a lead role in the Oscar winning Coen brothers’ 2007 film version of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. His talents though are not limited to acting and he has turned his hand to directing as well, after directing the TV movie The Good Old Boys (1995), Jones finally made his feature film directorial debut with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2006). “I’ve worked with more than 50 directors and I’ve paid attention since day one. That’s pretty much been my education, apart from studying art history and shooting with my own cameras. I’ve seen 50 different sets of mistakes and 50 different ways of achieving. You just leave the bad part out”.

If he was writing the script of his life, the bad part that he would leave out would probably be the combative relationship that he had with his father.  From all accounts his family life was no bed of roses, he had a younger brother who died in infancy and his parents divorced and both subsequently remarried. The movie business is tough on relationships, and Jones has not escaped unscathed, the actor has been married 3 times, most recently to photographer Dawn Laurel since March 2001. Despite his failed marriage to their mother Kimberlea, he is a proud father to his two children a 25-year-old son Austin and 17 year-old daughter Victoria.

Apart from work and family, Jones other passion – horses, he grew up around them and participated in rodeos and was an avid polo player before he became well known as an actor. “When I first came to California from New York, I hoped to resume my athletic life, which is hard to maintain in New York. I could no longer play football. I tried tennis, but it was too boring. Golf was too slow. I had started roping calves when I was a boy, and in California I hung out with some polo players. One of them gave me a mallet. All of a sudden I owned eight horses”.  A  natural born athlete, and of course star football player in his day, when asked whether his training as a football player was good training for polo. Jones said football is not necessarily a good preparation for polo, “Football is built to create a collision, Polo is built to avoid one.”

These days though Jones is a regular on the polo fields from Santa Barbara to Florida, where he not only fields a high goal team, (named after his native San Saba) during the season, but where he owns fifty acres on the edge of the Everglades. “We’ve built a world-class polo field and a practice field there, so my team and the kids’ teams can play. My daughter has been playing polo since she was six, and now she’s entirely fearless. She sometimes plays six chukkas.” His wife of 7 years Dawn Laurel is also a keen player and picked up the sport when she met Jones.  The actor says his wife “is one of the best women polo players in the country, and she didn’t even know how to ride a horse ten years ago.” He also owns a 74 acre facility in a polo country club on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Jones however is a Texan through and through and he learned polo the “cowboy” way. He firmly believes that cowboys - and gauchos and vaqueros - embody the best aspects of the game of kings. Those who know the sport acknowledge that one of the greatest polo players who ever lived was a Texas cowboy by the name of Cecil Smith. As luck would have it, Smith grew up a little over 30 miles from Jones’ hometown of San Saba, and Jones was fortunate enough to become a close friend of Smith’s whilst he was alive, when Jones swings into the saddle, he’s ready to play the sort of polo the legendary 10 goaler and fellow Texan knew best. Jones assessment of the game “It’s fast. If you can’t think, you can’t play”. A no-nonsense, practical, unsuperfluous description, a bit like the man himself.