Cherry Jones

Early life and education

Jones was born in Paris, Tennessee. Her mother was a high school teacher and her father owned a flower shop. Her parents were very supportive of her theatrical ambitions, encouraging her interest by sending her to classes with local drama teacher, Ruby Crider. Jones takes great pains to credit her high school speech teacher, Linda Wilson, with her first real preparatory work. She is a 1978 graduate of the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. While at CMU, she was one of the earliest actors to work at City Theatre, a prominent fixture of Pittsburgh theatre.

Career

Jones may be best known for her role as U.S. President Allison Taylor on the Fox series 24, for which she won an Emmy. However, most of her career has been in the theatre. Her Broadway performances include Lincoln Center's 1995 production of The Heiress, and also a 2005 production of John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt at the Walter Kerr Theatre. For both roles she earned a Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Play.

Other Broadway credits include Nora Ephron's play Imaginary Friends (with Swoosie Kurtz); Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, the 2000 revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten, and Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, for which she earned her first Tony nomination. She is considered to be one of the foremost theater actresses in the United States.

She has narrated the 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 recent years, Jones has ventured into feature films. Her screen credits include Cradle Will Rock, The Perfect Storm, Signs, Ocean's Twelve and The Village.

Jones played President Taylor on the Fox series 24, a role for which she won an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. She played the role in the seventh season as well as eighth season, which began airing in January 2010 and concluded in May 2010.

In 2012, Jones starred in the NBC drama series Awake as psychiatrist Dr. Judith Evans.

Also in 2012, she portrayed Amanda Wingfield in the Loeb Drama Center's revival of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie alongside Zachary Quinto, Brian J. Smith and Celia Keenan-Bolger.

In 2014, Cherry Jones was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

In 2015 and 2016 Jones had a recurring role on the Primetime Emmy Award-winning Amazon comedy-drama series Transparent in its second and third seasons. She was nominated for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Guest Performer in a Comedy Series for her work in the 2015 season.

In 2016, she appeared in "Nosedive", an episode of the anthology series Black Mirror.

Personal life

Jones is openly lesbian. In 1995, when Jones accepted her first Tony Award, she thanked her then-partner, architect Mary O'Connor, with whom she had an 18-year relationship.

She started dating actress Sarah Paulson in 2004. When she accepted her Best Actress Tony in 2005 for her work in Doubt, she thanked "Laura Wingfield," the Glass Menagerie character being played in the Broadway revival by Paulson. In 2007, Paulson and Jones declared their love for each other in an interview with Velvetpark at Women's Event 10 for the LGBT Center of New York. Paulson and Jones ended their relationship amicably in 2009.

In mid-2015, Jones married her girlfriend, filmmaker Sophie Huber.