Cherry Jones

Cherry Jones is an American actress born on November 21, 1956, in Paris, Tennessee. Her mother worked as a high school teacher and her father owned a flower shop; both encouraged her theatrical interests from an early age, supporting her studies with local drama teacher Ruby Krider. Jones has also credited her high school speech teacher, Linda Wilson, with providing her first substantive preparatory training. She graduated from the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in 1978, and while studying there was among the earliest actors to work at City Theatre in Pittsburgh. In 1980, she launched her professional career as a founding member of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jones made her Broadway debut in 1987 in Stepping Out, beginning a stage career that would span more than three decades. Her first Tony Award nomination came for Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good in 1991. In 1994, she appeared in the Broadway run of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Angels in America: Perestroika, taking on the role of the Angel after Ellen McLaughlin, who had originated the part. Jones earned her first Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for Lincoln Center's 1995 production of The Heiress, and a second Tony in the same category for the 2005 production of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt at the Walter Kerr Theatre, along with a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play that same year. Additional Tony nominations followed for the 2000 revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten and for The Glass Menagerie in 2014. Her Broadway work also includes The Night of the Iguana, Nora Ephron's Imaginary Friends opposite Swoosie Kurtz, and The Lifespan of a Fact in 2018, her most recent Broadway appearance. In 2014, Jones was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

On television, Jones gained wide recognition playing Barbara Layton on The West Wing and President Allison Taylor on the Fox series 24, portraying the character across the seventh season, which aired from January to May 2009, and the eighth season, which aired from January to May 2010. Her performance as President Taylor earned her the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2009. In 2012, she starred in the NBC drama Awake as psychiatrist Dr. Judith Evans. That same year she portrayed Amanda Wingfield in the Loeb Drama Center's revival of The Glass Menagerie alongside Zachary Quinto, Brian J. Smith, and Celia Keenan-Bolger. Jones appeared in recurring roles during the second and third seasons of the Amazon series Transparent in 2015 and 2016, receiving a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for that work. In 2016, she appeared in the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive." She played Holly, the mother of June/Offred, in the Hulu drama The Handmaid's Tale beginning in 2018, a role that brought her the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series in 2019. She received the same Emmy distinction in 2020 for her work in the HBO drama Succession.

Her film appearances include The Horse Whisperer (1998), Erin Brockovich (2000), The Perfect Storm (2000), Signs (2002), The Village (2004), Ocean's Twelve (2004), 24: Redemption (2008), Amelia (2009), The Beaver (2011), A Rainy Day in New York (2019), and The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021). Jones has also narrated audiobook adaptations of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, including Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, Farmer Boy, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, and Little Town on the Prairie.

In her personal life, Jones thanked her then-partner Mary O'Connor when accepting her first Tony Award in 1995, following an eighteen-year relationship. She subsequently dated actress Sarah Paulson beginning in 2004; the two ended their relationship in 2009. In mid-2015, Jones married filmmaker Sophie Huber.