Originally appeared on E! Online
Tommy Lee Jones is grieving a family tragedy.
The Oscar winner and his family released a statement following the death of his 34-year-old daughter Victoria Jones.
“We appreciate all of the kind words, thoughts, and prayers,” read the Jan. 2 statement to E! News. “Please respect our privacy during this difficult time.”
Victoria — an actress who made her debut in “Men in Black II” at age 11 — was found dead in a San Francisco hotel room in the early hours of Jan. 1, law enforcement sources told TMZ.
San Francisco Fire Department officials told E! News 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.
Victoria’s official cause of death has not been shared.
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And Tommy Lee, 79, was very proud of the work she put into her career as a kid, including her language skills.
“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.”
In fact, his bond with Victoria 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 is of interest to me.”
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