The phrase “voice of a generation” gets thrown around a lot, but if that label were defined by sheer recognizability, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better fit than James Earl Jones, who died Tuesday. The real question is: Which generation?

Depending on whether you were born before or after the year 1990, chances are the sound of Jones' drumming baritone immediately conjures up one of two characters in your mind: "The Lion King" dad Mufasa or "Star Wars" villain Darth Vader. That means Jones is speaking, and you either think of a cosmically wise patriarch, whose ghost returns to offer his self-doubting successor an encouraging "remember who you are," or the most evil dad in the entire universe, a destroyer of planets hell-bent on luring his son to the dark side.

Those two projects were such pop culture behemoths — Disney's Hamlet-on-the-Savannah riff nearly grossed $1 billion, while George Lucas' sci-fi saga garnered a near-religious following — that it hardly needs to be said that Jones made his mark without actually appearing in either franchise. But there's still a lot about the iconic voice you probably don't know.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Jones was a familiar face on New York stages, appearing on Broadway, of course, but also at Shakespeare in the Park, where Stanley Kubrick spotted him in a production of “The Merchant of Venice.” Kubrick had come to see George C. Scott in the same show, but ended up being impressed with Jones as well, giving the actor his first feature film role in “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”