Tommy Lee Jones and his family are mourning the death of his daughter, Victoria Jones, who was found dead in San Francisco on New Year’s Day. She was 34.
In a statement shared on Jan. 2, Jones and his family asked for privacy as they grieve.
“We appreciate all of the kind words, thoughts, and prayers,” the statement read. “Please respect our privacy during this difficult time.” No further details were provided.
San Francisco Fire Department officials confirmed that emergency responders were called to a reported medical emergency at a downtown San Francisco hotel in the early hours of Jan. 1.
“Our units responded to the scene, performed an assessment and declared one person deceased,” said a spokesperson.
Authorities did not publicly identify the victim at the time, and an official cause of death has not yet been released by the Medical Examiner’s Office.
Victoria Jones was the only daughter of Tommy Lee Jones, whom he shared with his former wife, Kimberlea Cloughley. The former couple also share a son, Austin Jones. Jones has been married to Dawn Laurel-Jones since 2001.
Victoria Jones was introduced to film audiences at a young age, making her screen debut at 11 in Men in Black II, starring opposite her father and Will Smith.
The sequel, scored by longtime film composer Danny Elfman, was a major box office release of the early 2000s and part of one of Hollywood’s most commercially successful franchises, bridging pop culture, cinema and contemporary soundtrack work of the era.
She later appeared in her father’s critically regarded films The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and The Homesman, the latter of which Jones directed and starred in alongside Meryl Streep. Her acting résumé also included a brief appearance on the television series One Tree Hill.
“She’s a good actress, has her SAG card, speaks impeccable Spanish,” the Lincoln actor told The New Yorker in 2006. “When she was a baby, I told Leticia, her nurse, to speak to her in Spanish.”
Beyond her on-screen credits, Jones has described his close relationship with his daughter as a creative influence. While discussing The Homesman in a 2014 conversation with Interview magazine, he reflected on the women in his life — including his daughter — as shaping his interest in stories centered on historical injustice and gendered experience in America.
“My grandmother, my mother, my wife, and my daughter are all women,” Lee told costar Meryl Streep in a 2014 Interview magazine feature.
“A lot of my dear friends, yourself included, are women. I am just interested in how they feel, and what’s wrong. And if you want to know what’s wrong today, looking at what was wrong yesterday is a pretty good place to start.”
