James Earl Jones, the voice behind Darth Vader, bids adieu to role: Report

Darth Vader's voice artist James Earl Jones has stepped down from voicing the character after 50 years in Star Wars films, as per Variety.

As per the media portal, the 91-year-old actor has called it a day as archival voice recordings are put up to use by filmmakers, who aim to employ artificial intelligence synthetic speech technology to recreate the actor's younger voice from his earlier films for future Star Wars projects.

"He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character," Matthew Wood, a Lucasfilm veteran of 32 years, told the outlet. "So how do we move forward?"

Jones initially voiced the notorious film villain in the original trilogy of Star Wars. At the same time, David Prowse appeared on-screen in the infamous black mask. Jones gave voice to the character on both the big and small screen up until this point.