A hawk-featured, light-haired American character actor of stage and screen, Jeffrey Jones grew up in Buffalo, New York and became enamored of the theater on his frequent childhood visits to the Stratford Theater in Ontario, Canada. He came to the attention of Tyrone Guthrie while acting in a production of "Hobson's Choice" at Wisconsin's Lawrence University, then spent his sophomore year at the prestigious Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and worked there on his breaks from school. It was Guthrie who arranged for him to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art on full scholarship, and Jones went on to perform with the Stratford Festival in Ontario, the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Actors Theatre of Louisville before settling in NYC. After appearing alongside Meryl Streep and John Lithgow in a 1975 Lincoln Center production of "Trelawny of the Wells", he appeared in a successful revival of "Boy Meets Girl" (1976), directed by Lithgow. He also made his Broadway debut in "The Elephant Man" (1980), starring David Bowie, and acted in the original Off-Broadway production of "Cloud Nine" (1981), directed by Tommy Tune.
Although he had made his feature debut in "The Revolutionary" (1970), a docudrama about campus activism starring Jon Voight and Jennifer Salt, Jones made his first indelible impression on the public with his marvelous portrayal of vacuous Austrian Emperor Joseph II (proclaiming that one of the composer's works had "too many notes") in Milos Forman's Academy Award-winning film version of "Amadeus" (1984). He then delivered one of his most-inspired bits of nonsense as Principal Ed Rooney, the hapless nemesis of Matthew Broderick in John Hughes' "Ferris Beuller's Day Off" (1986), evoking a live-action version of Chuck Jones' Wile E Coyote in his constantly inventive performance. Viewers who had practically wet themselves watching his hilarious antics as Rooney forgave him his involvement in that year's "Howard the Duck", and he soon found himself in his first picture with director Tim Burton, playing the smarmy mortal who moves his family into the fixer-upper haunted by ghosts Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin in "Beetlejuice" (1988). Other memorable roles during the 80s included his Army officer confined to "The Hanoi Hilton" (1987) and his unappetizing older man who marries the innocent young girl despoiled by "Valmont" (1989), his second teaming with Forman.
Jones started out the 90s with a bang, appearing as technical consultant Skip Tyler in the John McTiernan blockbuster "The Hunt for Red October" (1990), based on Tom Clancy's novel. His reunion with Broderick on "Out on a Limb" (1992) was not so fortuitous, though the bomb did enable him to play demented twin brothers. He rejoined Burton to better effect on "Ed Wood" (1994) and would join the director again at decade's end in the small role of Reverend Steenwyck in "Sleepy Hollow" (1999). In between, he played Thomas Putnam in Nicholas Hytner's film version of "The Crucible" (1996), essayed the managing partner of Satan's law firm whose last mistake was trying to double-cross the boss in "The Devil's Advocate" (1997) and appeared as the genial commanding officer of Antonio Bird's darkly comic thriller "Ravenous" (1999). He also had a small role as Uncle Crenshaw in that year's hit "Stuart Little" and later joined the cast of "The Breakers" (2001), the story of a mother-daughter con team. Though he has appeared far less frequently on TV, he did act in three CBS miniseries in 1986 and headlined the short-lived CBS series "The People Next Door" (1990), among his small screen credits. He also returned to the New York stage in the 1995 Off-Broadway production of Neil Simon's "London Suite.”
Fondly remembered by 1980s-era fans for his earlier roles in John Hughes and Tim Burton films, Jones received a different kind of notoriety in 2002 when Los Angeles police arrested him and charged him with using a minor for prohibitive acts" and a misdemeanor count of possessing child pornography, accused of hiring a 14-year-old boy to pose for sexually explicit snapshots. The raid on Jones was done in conjunction with another investigation involving another Tim Burton regular, actor Paul Reubens, Pee-Wee Herman's real-life alter ego, who was also charged with possession of child pornography. His career stopped dead in its tracks, but eventually picked up again in 2004 when he joined the cast of HBO’s revisionist western series, “Deadwood” (2004- ), playing a wanting newspaper editor.