Tommy Lee Jones is enduring a family tragedy. The Oscar winner and his family issued a statement following the untimely passing of his 34-year-old daughter, Victoria Jones. The statement, released on January 2nd, read: "We appreciate all the kind words, thoughts, and prayers. Please respect our privacy during this difficult time."
Victoria, an actress who made her debut in Men in Black II at the age of 11, was found dead in a San Francisco hotel room in the wee hours of January 1st. Law enforcement sources confirmed her death to TMZ.
San Francisco Fire Department officials informed E! News that they responded to a medical emergency at 2:52 a.m. on New Year's Day. When paramedics arrived, they pronounced the victim—who they did not identify—dead at the scene. The official cause of Victoria's death has not been disclosed.
After her role in her father and Will Smith's 2002 film, Victoria—who Tommy Lee shared with ex-wife Kimberlea Cloughley and son Austin Jones, 43—appeared in her father's 2005 neo-Western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and 2014's The Homesman. Her other acting credits include a brief role in One Tree Hill.
Tommy Lee, 79, was extremely proud of the work his daughter put into her career as a child, including her language skills. "She's a good actress, has her SAG card, and 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."
In fact, Victoria's bond with her father was one of the inspirations behind The Homesman, a Western exploring sexism in the 1800s that he wrote, directed, and starred in. "My grandmother, my mother, my wife, and my daughter are all women," Tommy Lee, who married Dawn Laurel-Jones in 2001, told costar Meryl Streep in a 2014 Interview magazine conversation. "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."
"There's an undeniable tradition of sexism in this country that ties into the move westward by people of European descent and different ways of looking at Manifest Destiny on the west side of the Mississippi River," he continued. "So those struggles and what made them a struggle are of interest to me."
