Cherry Jones

The talented Cherry Jones is known as a prolific stage actress, as well as for playing supporting roles in the film industry and as a lesbian and gay rights activist. Her stage work is of particular notability, as she is also a two-time Tony Award winner. In fact, Jones is generally considered one of the best stage and theater actresses in the U.S. today. 

Jones was born in Paris, Tennessee, on November 21, 1956, a birthday she shares with Goldie Hawn, Björk, Juliet Mills, and Nicollette Sheridan—although all these celebrities were born in different years. She graduated with a BFA in drama from Carnegie Mellon University, and began her professional career in the early 1980s, around the same time she “came out of the closet” and began actively advocating for homosexual rights. 

Jones won her first Tony Award (best actress in a play) for her performance in the 1995 Broadway production of The Heiress, which debuted at the Lincoln Center, after which she made headlines by thanking her lesbian partner (Mary O’Connor, an architect) in her acceptance speech. She was previously nominated for the same award in 1991 for Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, and then again in 2000 for a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten.  

But Jones would be honored again with a Tony Award for Best Actress in 2005, for her role as Sister Aloysius in the parable-play Doubt, by John Patrick Shanley, which premiered at the Walter Kerr Theatre in spring of that year. Upon acceptance of her second Tony Award, Jones again thanked her lesbian lover, actress Sarah Paulson—although she actually publicly thanked Paulson’s then-character “Laura Wingfield” from the Broadway rendition of The Glass Menagerie. 

Although she is first and foremost a stage and Broadway actress, Jones has also made a name for herself as a film actress in mostly supporting roles in a number of major blockbuster hits. Some of her first more notable screen credits include roles in The Horse Whisperer in 1998, co-starring Robert Redford, Kristin Scott Thomas, Sam Neill, and Scarlett Johansson; Cradle Will Rock in 1999, with Hank Azaria, Joan Cusack, and John Cusack; and in 2000, Julia Roberts’ Erin Brockovich; and The Perfect Storm, starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Diane Lane. 

More recently, Jones can be seen in supporting roles in Signs, where she portrayed an officer, and in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, in which she played Sandra Bullock’s character’s mother as a middle-aged woman. She also had a role in M Night Shyamalan’s The Village and Ocean’s Twelve, both in 2004.

YUDDY