thesis was on "the mechanics of Catholicism" in the works of Flannery O'Connor. At Harvard, he was a pupil of dramatist Robert Chapman. College football Jones played guard at Harvard from 1965 to 1968. He was a member of Harvard's undefeated 1968 football team. He was named as a first-team All-Ivy League selection, and played in the 1968 Game. The game featured a memorable and last-minute Harvard 16-point comeback to tie Yale. He recounted his memory of "the most famous football game in Ivy League history" in the documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29–29. Career Early acting and film (1960s–1980) Jones moved to New York to become an actor, making his Broadway debut in 1969's A Patriot for Me in a number of supporting roles. In 1970, he landed his first film role, coincidentally playing a Harvard student in Love Story (Erich Segal, the author of Love Story, said that he based the lead character of Oliver on aspects of two undergraduate roommates he knew while on a sabbatical at Harvard, Jones and Al Gore). In early 1971, he returned to Broadway in Abe Burrows' Four on a Garden where he shared the stage with Carol Channing and Sid Caesar. Between 1971 and 1975 he portrayed Dr. Mark Toland on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live. He returned to the stage for a short-lived 1974 production of Ulysses in Nighttown, an adaptation of one episode from James Joyce's novel Ulysses, playing Stephen Dedalus opposite Zero Mostel's Leopold Bloom and directed by Burgess Meredith. It was followed by the acclaimed TV movie The Amazing Howard Hughes, where he played the lead role. In films, he played a hunted escaped convict in Jackson County Jail (1976); a Vietnam veteran in Rolling Thunder (1977); an automobile mogul, co-starring with Laurence Olivier, in the Harold Robbins drama The Betsy; and a police detective opposite Faye Dunaway in the 1978 thriller Eyes of Laura Mars. In 1980, Jones earned his first Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of country singer Loretta Lynn's husband, Doolittle "Mooney" Lynn, in Coal Miner's Daughter. In 1981, he played a drifter opposite Sally Field in Back Roads, a comedy that received middling reviews. Increased exposure (1983–2004) In 1983, he received an Emmy for Best Actor for his performance as murderer Gary Gilmore in a TV adaptation of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. The same year, he starred in a