Cherry Jones

Cherry Jones (born November 21, 1956) is an American actress who spent two decades building one of the most decorated stage careers of her generation, then walked into television past fifty and started winning there too. Two Tony Awards, three Primetime Emmys, three Drama Desk Awards: the trophy count is real, but the more useful description is that Jones is the actor other actors watch. Her signature is a kind of unsentimental stillness, a refusal to signal emotion before the text earns it, and it works whether she is playing a Victorian brothel keeper, a nun with a hunch, or the President of the United States.

She came up through the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a founding member in 1980, reached Broadway in 1987 with Stepping Out, and won her first Tony in 1995 as Catherine Sloper in The Heiress. Ten years later she originated Sister Aloysius in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt and won again. The screen career that followed was not a pivot so much as an expansion: character work in The Horse Whisperer, Erin Brockovich, The Perfect Storm, Signs, and The Village, then a run of prestige television that produced Emmy wins for 24, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Succession. She is a five-time Tony nominee and, as of July 2026, a seven-time Emmy nominee.

The current chapter is unusually busy for an actor approaching seventy. She led The Grapes of Wrath at London’s National Theatre in 2024, became a series regular on Apple TV+’s Foundation in 2025, and drew her seventh Emmy nomination in July 2026 for a single episode of Hacks, a comedy she reportedly turned down twice before saying yes. Justine Triet cast her in Fonda, the Palme d’Or winner’s first English-language feature, which shot in France and England in spring 2026. The through-line across all of it is that Jones keeps being handed the person in the room who tells the truth.

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Quick Facts

Trailer Video

Video courtesy of Apple TV’s official YouTube channel.

Featured Video

Video courtesy of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation.

Early Life & Education

Cherry Jones grew up in Paris, Tennessee, a small town in the western part of the state whose other claim to fame is the World’s Biggest Fish Fry. Her mother taught high school English and her father ran a flower shop, and neither of them treated a theatrical daughter as a problem to be managed. They sent her to lessons with a local drama teacher, Ruby Krider, and Jones has spent decades crediting her high school speech teacher, Linda Wilson, with the first genuinely rigorous preparation she received. The name itself carries family weight: Cherry was her mother’s maiden name, and her grandmother, Thelma Cherry, told her from the age of three that she was going to have a career on the stage.

She left Tennessee for the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama and graduated in 1978, and while she was in Pittsburgh she became one of the earliest actors to work at City Theatre, still a fixture of the city’s stage scene. Then came the unglamorous part. She moved to New York, scooped ice cream, waited tables, and later described the era with characteristic bluntness: she was not anybody’s idea of a classic ingénue, and she assumed she would not work steadily until she was thirty-five.

What rescued her was a company, not a break. She landed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s theatre company and from there joined the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge in 1980 as a founding member, paid to act alongside senior colleagues rather than paying tuition for the privilege. Jones has been pointed about the difference, arguing that acting is a guild and that young actors now lose years to conservatory programs that charge them for stage time she was given a salary to learn on. She has said the ART is where she learned how not to act, how to just say the lines, and how to use stillness. Every performance she has given since is built on those three lessons.

Career Highlights and Milestones

Jones spent the 1980s and early 1990s doing what almost no American actor of her stature does anymore: working continuously in repertory, Off-Broadway, and regional theatre without a screen career to subsidize it. Her Off-Broadway debut came in Manhattan Theatre Club’s 1983 production of The Philanthropist, followed by the Public Theater’s The Ballad of Soapy Smith and a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest. Broadway arrived in 1987 with the Tommy Tune-directed Stepping Out, and the following year she played Lady Macduff opposite Christopher Plummer and Glenda Jackson in Macbeth. Her first Tony nomination came in 1991 for Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, and in 1994 she stepped into Angels in America on Broadway as the Angel, taking over a role Ellen McLaughlin had originated.

The 1995 Lincoln Center revival of The Heiress changed her standing. As Catherine Sloper, the plain, wealthy daughter who learns exactly what her suitor wants, Jones won the Tony and the Drama Desk and became the actor New York critics reached for when they wanted to argue that the American theatre still produced greatness. She won another Drama Desk for Pride’s Crossing in 1998 and a Tony nomination for the 2000 revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten. Then, in 2005, she originated Sister Aloysius Beauvier in Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer-winning two-hander of suspicion, and swept the season: Tony, Drama Desk, Obie, Lucille Lortel, and Outer Critics Circle. She played the part for hundreds of performances across its Off-Broadway and Broadway runs, a workload that later gave her a good line about what came next.

What came next was the Presidency. Cast as Allison Taylor on the seventh season of 24, Jones brought a stage actor’s economy to a genre that usually runs hot, and won the 2009 Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, the first Emmy of her career. It opened a second act that has been remarkably productive. She anchored NBC’s short-lived Awake as a psychiatrist, played Marguerite Oswald in Hulu’s 11.22.63, turned up in Black Mirror‘s “Nosedive,” and drew a Screen Actors Guild ensemble nomination for her recurring work as academic Leslie Mackinaw on Transparent. She won a second Emmy in 2019 as Holly, June’s flinty feminist mother on The Handmaid’s Tale, and a third in 2020 as Nan Pierce, the patrician media owner who out-maneuvers the Roys on Succession. Not everything landed: Extrapolations and the animated Velma both took critical beatings, and her public defense of Woody Allen after appearing in A Rainy Day in New York drew significant criticism.

The most recent stretch has been the busiest of her life. She returned to the London stage in summer 2024 as Ma Joad in Carrie Cracknell’s The Grapes of Wrath at the National Theatre, a production critics found uneven and Jones almost universally praised for; the filmed version joined National Theatre at Home that December. In 2025 she became a series regular on Foundation as Ambassador Felice Quent, and returned to The Handmaid’s Tale for its final season, earning another Emmy nomination. Then came Hacks: co-creator Paul W. Downs called her three separate times before she agreed to play Kelly Kilpatrick, a rival comedian with a grudge against Deborah Vance, in the fifth and final season’s episode “Montecito.” It earned her a 2026 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series, her first nomination in a comedy category in a forty-six-year career.

Selected film and TV highlights

• The Philanthropist (Off-Broadway debut, 1983)
• Stepping Out (Broadway debut, 1987)
• The Heiress (1995)
• The Horse Whisperer (1998)
• Cradle Will Rock (1999)
• Erin Brockovich (2000)
• The Perfect Storm (2000)
• Signs (2002)
• The Village (2004)
• Doubt (2005)
• 24 (2009 to 2010)
• The Glass Menagerie (Broadway 2013, West End 2017)
• Transparent (2015 to 2019)
• The Lifespan of a Fact (2018)
• The Handmaid’s Tale (2018 to 2025)
• Succession (2019 to 2023)
• The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)
• Five Days at Memorial (2022)
• The Grapes of Wrath (National Theatre, 2024)
• Foundation (2025)
• Hacks (2026)

Major recognition

• Tony Award, Best Actress in a Play, for The Heiress (won)
• Tony Award, Best Actress in a Play, for Doubt (won)
• Primetime Emmy Award, Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, for 24 (won)
• Primetime Emmy Award, Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series, for The Handmaid’s Tale (won)
• Primetime Emmy Award, Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series, for Succession (won)
• Drama Desk Awards, Outstanding Actress in a Play, for The Heiress, Pride’s Crossing, and Doubt (won)
• Obie, Lucille Lortel, and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Doubt (won)
• Laurence Olivier Award nomination, Best Actress, for The Glass Menagerie (2017)
• Inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame (2014)

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Awards and Accolades

Filmography / Notable Works

Net Worth, Income, & Lifestyle

Social Media & Online Presence

Fan communities on social media (unofficial)

NOTE: In addition to any official accounts listed above, many fan-run pages and clip accounts exist across platforms. These are not confirmed to be affiliated with Cherry Jones. Links and usernames can change at any time.

Trivia & Lesser-Known Facts

• Her first name is her mother’s maiden name. Her grandmother, Thelma Cherry, told her from the age of three that she would have a career on the stage, and died during Jones’s senior year of high school, before any of it happened.
• She has played two presidents and one ambassador on screen: Allison Taylor on 24, Elizabeth Burdick on Extrapolations, and Felice Quent on Foundation. She has joked that moving from a nun in Doubt to the Oval Office was a fairly logical career step.
• Accounts of how long she played Sister Aloysius differ. Contemporary write-ups put the run above 500 performances; Jones herself has estimated closer to 700 across the Off-Broadway and Broadway engagements.
• She narrated the audiobook editions of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, from Little House in the Big Woods through Little Town on the Prairie, and has also done animated voice work on Frasier and Velma.
• When she accepted her first Tony in 1995, she thanked her partner from the stage at a time when almost no one did. She has been out publicly since 1980 and has been an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ+ rights throughout her career.
• The Grapes of Wrath in 2024 marked only her second major appearance on a London stage, after the 2017 West End transfer of The Glass Menagerie that earned her an Olivier nomination.

Quotes

“I feel as if my generation has finally arrived.”

– Cherry Jones, Playbill (1995, during the run of The Heiress)

“Never confuse your self worth with your professional accomplishments.”

– Cherry Jones, quoting her mother’s advice, Santa Clara Magazine (2007)

“The horizons are more expansive than that.”

– Cherry Jones on the classical roles she has never been asked to play, Backstage (2018)

“playing the President after an old crusty nun is sort of a linear move”

– Cherry Jones on being cast in 24, TVBrittanyF interview (September 2025)

“no one’s ever wanted me that much”

– Cherry Jones on being asked three times to join Hacks, Out (May 2026)

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: What is Cherry Jones’s age?
A: She was born on November 21, 1956, and is 69 years old as of 2026.

Q: What is Cherry Jones best known for?
A: On stage, for originating Sister Aloysius in Doubt and for Catherine Sloper in The Heiress, both Tony-winning performances. On screen, for President Allison Taylor on 24, Holly on The Handmaid’s Tale, and Nan Pierce on Succession.

Q: How many Tony Awards and Emmys has Cherry Jones won?
A: Two Tony Awards from five nominations, and three Primetime Emmy Awards from seven nominations as of July 2026. She has never been nominated for an Academy Award.

Q: Where is Cherry Jones from?
A: Paris, Tennessee. She trained at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, graduating in 1978.

Q: Is Cherry Jones married?
A: Yes. She married Swiss filmmaker Sophie Huber in 2015. She was previously in a long relationship with Mary O’Connor and, from 2004 to 2009, with actress Sarah Paulson.

Q: Does Cherry Jones have official social media?
A: No verified personal accounts have been identified on Instagram, X, TikTok, or Facebook. Several unrelated people share her name online, so treat any such profile as unofficial.

Upcoming Projects

• Fonda (in post-production, release date to be announced) – Justine Triet’s first fully English-language feature, a psychological thriller led by Mia Goth with Allison Janney, Andrew Scott, Benedict Wong, Ewan Mitchell, Odessa A’zion, Frank Dillane, and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. Reported to have shot from April to June 2026 in southwest France with additional days in the English countryside. No distributor date has been announced, and timing can shift.
• 78th Emmy Awards (September 2026) – Nominated for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for Hacks. Guest performer categories are presented at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards on September 5 and 6, ahead of the main telecast on September 14.
• Stage work (unannounced) – No Broadway or West End engagement has been announced. Her most recent Broadway credit remains The Lifespan of a Fact (2018), and her most recent stage appearance was The Grapes of Wrath in London in 2024. Treat any reported casting as subject to change until officially confirmed.

Interviews & Features

• The New York Times Magazine, “Cherry Jones, at the Peak of Her Powers” (2013), a long-form profile timed to the Broadway Glass Menagerie, covering her ART years, her private life, and why she stayed a theatre actor.
• WhatsOnStage, “Cherry Jones: I’m in heaven, I don’t ever want to leave the UK” (2017), an interview from her West End debut in which she argues that British actors are better served by moving constantly between stage and screen.
• Backstage, “Cherry Jones Talks a Life in Theater and Coming to Terms With Her Newfound Screen Fame” (2018), a career-spanning conversation around The Lifespan of a Fact, including her account of the near-bankrupt New York she arrived in.
• The Guardian, “Chimerica’s Cherry Jones: Everything progressive in America has been trampled on” (Apr 2019), the interview in which she discussed American politics and defended Woody Allen, a position that drew criticism.
• Out, “How Hacks (finally) got Cherry Jones to guest star for its funniest episode yet” (May 2026), on playing Kelly Kilpatrick, working with Leslie Bibb and Jean Smart, and what she would tell younger lesbians.

Public Appearances & Festivals

• 61st Primetime Emmy Awards (Sep 20, 2009): Won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for 24 in Los Angeles, the first Emmy of her career.
• American Theater Hall of Fame induction (2014): Inducted in New York alongside a class that included Ellen Burstyn and Cameron Mackintosh.
• Olivier Awards nominees celebration (Mar 10, 2017): Attended the nominees event in London following her Best Actress nomination for the West End Glass Menagerie.
• The Grapes of Wrath opening night (Jul 31, 2024): Opened as Ma Joad on the Lyttelton stage at the National Theatre in London, in a production that ran through September 14 and was later filmed for National Theatre at Home.
• Lambda Legal Liberty Awards National Dinner (Jun 4, 2026): Attended the Liberty Awards at The Glasshouse in New York, where Annette Bening and journalist Kara Swisher were honored.