The world will remember James Earl Jones, who died Monday at the age of 93, for his contributions to film, some of which are secure in the pop-culture canon.

New York, however, will remember Jones for his contributions to theater, for which he received three Tony Awards (including one for lifetime achievement in 2017) and, in 2022, a rare distinction: the renaming of a Broadway theater in his honor.

Jones once recalled that when he moved to New York to study acting, in 1957, his father, Robert Earl Jones (himself an actor), took him to live performances. In rapid succession, the young man saw the opera “Tosca,” the ballet “Swan Lake,” the musical “Pal Joey” and the drama “The Crucible.” This wide range may help explain Jones’s own rich, startlingly diverse stage career.

For years, the actor deftly navigated oft-produced classics, head-scratching experimental theater, searching new works by major contemporary playwrights and, later in his career, popular dramas and comedies. Jones made his Broadway debut in the late 1950s but throughout the 1960s and ’70s, he also appeared in smaller venues. In 1961, for example, he was in the Living Theater’s avant-garde, resolutely countercultural production of “The Apple.” In 1965 he won an Obie Award for his performance in Bertolt Brecht’s “Baal” and also appeared in Georg Büchner’s “Danton’s Death” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. In the 1970s, he was Hickman in “The Iceman Cometh,” and in the 1980s he starred in two dramas by the South African playwright Athol Fugard — all three on Broadway.

Here are five productions that reflect Jones’s astonishing range and his commitment to the theater.

1961

‘The Blacks’

A cast of unknowns that included Jones, Cicely Tyson, Maya Angelou, Roscoe Lee Browne and Louis Gossett Jr. appeared in this explosive work by the French writer Jean Genet. An experimental take on power and oppression in which some of the Black actors wore white masks, “The Blacks” had its New York premiere in 1961 at St. Mark’s Playhouse in Manhattan’s East Village. In just over a week, Howard Taubman of The New York Times wrote not one but two raves about the production, praising it as “one of the most stimulating evenings Broadway or Off Broadway has to offer” and deeming it an event “on any level that matters.”

1964

‘Othello’

A natural Shakespearean, Jones appeared in several productions at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival and its successor, Shakespeare in the Park. Toward the end of his run there, he gave what The Times described as “one of his finest performances” in “King Lear” in 1973 (which is on YouTube).

But the role that would prove to leave a lasting impression was that of Othello, which he had taken on 10 years earlier. “Mr. Jones commands a full, resonant voice and a supple body, and his jealous rages and frothing frenzy have not only size but also emotional credibility,” The Times wrote in a review in 1964.

When the actor returned to the role of the jealous Moor on Broadway, in 1982, facing Christopher Plummer’s Iago, Frank Rich wrote in these pages that “Mr. Jones’s ease and authority as a military commander seem his by birthright, even as he maintains the uneasy aloofness of an outsider.”

In 1967, Jones portrayed a heavyweight boxing champion inspired by the real-life Jack Johnson in “The Great White Hope,” a new play at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., by Howard Sackler. The role proved to be a turning point in his career: The epic drama transferred to Broadway in 1968, and Jones became the first African-American to win the Tony Award for best actor in a play. He reprised the part in Martin Ritt’s film adaptation in 1970, earning an Academy Award nomination. Tellingly, Jones followed that breakthrough with a daring show on Broadway: Lorraine Hansberry’s anti-colonialist play “Les Blancs” — ironically, an answer of sort to Genet’s “The Blacks,” in which Jones had so memorably appeared less than a decade earlier.

1987

Jones’s first Broadway gig was as the understudy to Lloyd Richards in the short-lived play “The Egghead,” in 1957. Richards then became a respected, successful director, and it’s in that capacity that he worked with Jones again, directing him in such shows as the two-hander “Paul Robeson,” Fugard’s “A Lesson From Aloes” and, most notably, the Broadway premiere of August Wilson’s “Fences,” in 1987. Jones won his second Tony for his performance as the volatile garbage collector Troy Maxson. You might think this triumph would have made the actor even more in demand onstage, but his film career took priority and he did not return to Broadway until 2005 in “On Golden Pond” (for which he was, once again, nominated for a Tony).

It’s hard to pick one out of the six Broadway shows that Jones, in what might be deemed his patriarch years, appeared in between 2005 and 2015. All of them were revivals of crowd-pleasing plays and in all of them he gave strong performances. Let’s single out, then, the one that earned Jones his fourth trip to the Tonys: his turn as a former president of the United States in the political satire “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man.” The production received mixed reviews, but The Times praised him for digging “into his role with a relish you can surely sense from the back row of the balcony.”

Other roles in that busy decade include the loyal chauffeur of “Driving Miss Daisy” opposite Vanessa Redgrave (2010), and a beloved eccentric grandfather in the George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy “You Can’t Take It With You” (2014).

In a fortuitous move, the strands of Jones’s theatrical career came together in what turned out to be his final appearance at a New York theater: He appeared in a revival of the two-hander “The Gin Game” with Cicely Tyson — his castmate from “The Blacks,” back in 1961.