CHERRY JONES

Date of Birth: November 21, 1956

She appeared with Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer but if asked, will tell you she much prefers to act on the stage.

"I love the language of the theater, and I know that that's something that often is left out of the equation of even very fine film making nowadays. There is a heightened, articulate, poetic language that I crave in my work that I just don't think you get much of a shot at in movies."

Cherry Jones won the coveted Tony Award for Best Actress for her work in The Heiress in 1997 and made history when she thanked her same-sex partner. Since then she starred as Hannah Jelkes in The Night of the Iguana at the Roundabout Theatre's Stage Right.

Cherry Jones has also appeared on Broadway in Angels in America, Our Country's Good, Macbeth and Stepping Out. Her awards include an Obie for her performance in Baltimore Waltz and Chicago's Jeff Award for her roles in The Good Person of Setzuan and The Night of the Iguana at the Goodman Theatre.

Her passion for theater is all consuming, transporting her, as well as her audiences, to splendid and poetic places.

"I've always been fascinated ... almost worshipful of brilliant people," she says. "... brilliant minds that are able to articulate their thoughts. ... I think that it is the joy of being able to ... express myself with the mind of a Shakespeare or a Chekhov or an O'Neill ... the thoughts that they agonized over, lines that they lost sleep over, trying to hone it into this beautifully crafted expression. It's a real turn-on ... to find a way to do it, if only for two hours every night. It makes me feel awfully dull at the bar after the show, but for those two hours I get to be brilliant."

Jones is an outspoken advocate for gay rights. She received the Vito Russo Entertainer Award in 2004 from the GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) Media Awards.