Tommy Lee Jones (born Thomas Lee Jones, 15 September 1946, in San Saba, Texas) is an American actor and film director. He rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s for a run of gruff, authoritative roles, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard in The Fugitive (1993). He also played Agent K in the Men in Black film series, and picked up further Oscar nominations for JFK (1991), In the Valley of Elah (2007) and Lincoln (2012), in which he played Congressman Thaddeus Stevens.
Jones studied at Harvard University, graduating in 1969 with a degree in English literature, before moving into acting on Broadway and then in film and television. His long list of screen credits also includes The Client, Natural Born Killers, Batman Forever, No Country for Old Men and Coal Miner's Daughter.
The earlier version of this entry described Jones simply as "Tommy Jones" and claimed he was "of Welsh descent, on his father's side". That claim appears to trace back to online round-ups of supposedly Welsh celebrities rather than to any documented family record. His father, Clyde C. Jones (1926-1986), was a Texas-born cowboy and oil field worker, and genealogical research into the family tree shows that Clyde's parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were also all born in the United States. Jones's documented ancestry runs mainly to England, Scotland and Scots-Irish/Northern Ireland, alongside Cherokee heritage on another branch of the family. No verified Welsh line has been found, so the original claim behind this entry cannot be confirmed.
The entry is kept here, corrected, to set the record straight rather than repeat an unproven claim: Tommy Lee Jones remains one of the most respected American actors of his generation, but the evidence for a Welsh family connection is, at best, unconfirmed.