Jessie Buckley

• 1. Introduction

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  Jessie Buckley, an Irish actress and singer born on the 28th of December 1989, became the first Irish winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress. She won it in 2026 for playing Agnes Shakespeare in the period drama Hamnet. The win closed a long climb that moved between concert halls, rehearsal rooms, film sets and recording studios. How does someone who trained as a musician and an actor end up equally at home in a West End musical, a folk horror film and a Mercury Prize shortlist? What happened to her in the years before anyone outside Ireland knew her name? And why do critics keep describing her performances in terms of sheer force?

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• 2. Kerry And Tipperary

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  Jessie Buckley was born in Killarney, County Kerry, to Marina Cassidy and Tim Buckley. She has a younger brother and three younger sisters. Her great-grandmother, Madge Clifford, was an Irish republican.

  At Ursuline Secondary School in Thurles, County Tipperary, she studied at an all-girls convent school where her mother works as a vocal coach. Buckley took male parts in school productions. She played Tony, the male lead in West Side Story, and Freddie Trumper in Chess.

  Music ran alongside the acting. At the Royal Irish Academy of Music she reached grade eight in piano, clarinet and harp, and she belonged to the Tipperary Millennium Orchestra. Summer workshops with the Association of Irish Musical Societies sharpened her singing and acting.

  It was at those workshops that people noticed her talent as an actress and urged her to apply to drama school in London. Rejection came first. Just before her first audition for a television talent show, two drama schools turned her down, one of them the day before.

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• 3. Second Place

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  On the 31st of May 2008, Buckley reached the final of I'd Do Anything and finished second behind Jodie Prenger. The BBC talent show was a search for an unknown performer to play Nancy in the 2009 West End revival of the musical Oliver!.

  In 2026, Buckley looked back on the show with pain. She told British Vogue that she felt "brutalised" and "objectified". She said the judges made jokes about her appearance in front of the cameras. In one episode they sent her, then 17, to "femininity school". She added that she had not fully recognised it at the time and had only felt it.

  The weeks around the final were busy. On the 26th of August 2008 she performed on Denny Street in Tralee, County Kerry, for RTÉ Radio 1, and she then sang at a charity concert in County Tipperary.

  On the 14th of September 2008 she appeared at an outdoor concert in Hyde Park, London, celebrating Andrew Lloyd Webber's birthday. She sang "I Don't Know How To Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar as a solo. With fellow finalists Keisha Amponsa-Banson, Niamh Perry and Rachel Tucker, she also sang "Light at the End of the Tunnel" from Starlight Express.

  Four days later, she and Aoife Mulholland performed with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra at another Lloyd Webber event, held at the National Concert Hall in Dublin.

  The prize for the runner-up was an offer to understudy Nancy. Buckley turned it down in favour of a different production.

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• 4. On Stage

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  On the 10th of October 2008, it was announced that Buckley would make her Off-West End debut as Anne Egerman in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music. The revival ran at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a small fringe studio theatre in London, from the 22nd of November 2008 to the 8th of March 2009. Trevor Nunn directed, and she shared the stage with Maureen Lipman and Hannah Waddingham.

  Christmas and Valentine concerts followed. In 2009 she sang alongside Maria Friedman, Cantabile and Tim Rice. In February 2010 she joined Daniel Boys and her A Little Night Music co-star Kelly Price for a run of Valentine concerts.

  She graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in January 2013. That summer she joined Shakespeare's Globe for its 2013 season. She played Miranda in The Tempest, and in Samuel Adamson's Gabriel she played both the singer Arabella Hunt and Kate.

  In September 2013 she appeared opposite Jude Law in Michael Grandage's West End production of Henry V at the Noël Coward Theatre. Two years later she played Perdita in The Winter's Tale, staged by Kenneth Branagh's theatre company at London's Garrick Theatre. A live stream reached cinemas worldwide on the 4th of December 2015.

  Eddie Redmayne then approached her to play Sally Bowles opposite him in a revival of Cabaret. She embraced the gruelling demands of the role and stayed strictly silent during the day to protect her voice for eight shows a week. The production opened to rave reviews in the West End in November 2021.

  David Benedict of Variety wrote that she played Bowles "with astonishing fierceness". Nick Curtis of the Evening Standard called her "a powerhouse of emotion". At the 2022 Olivier Awards the production won Best Musical Revival, and Buckley won Best Actress in a Musical.

  On the 6th of May 2025 she returned to the stage opposite Tim Crouch in a performance of An Oak Tree at the Young Vic in London.

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• 5. Screen Breakthrough

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  After an episode of the detective drama Endeavour, Buckley played Marya Bolkonskaya in the BBC's 2016 dramatisation of War and Peace. Viv Groskop of The Guardian picked her out as a highlight of the second episode. She wrote that Buckley played the supposedly plain and pious character "beautifully".

  A run of television roles followed. In 2017 she took a main part in Taboo, starring Tom Hardy, and played Honor Martin in the BBC One drama The Last Post. In 2018 she played Marian Halcombe in a five-part adaptation of Wilkie Collins's novel The Woman in White.

  Her film debut came as Moll Huntford in the psychological thriller Beast. Then she took the lead in Wild Rose, a country music drama in which she played an aspiring singer. The role earned her a nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role at the 73rd British Academy Film Awards.

  Wild Rose also gave her a musical audience. She performed songs from the film at the Glastonbury Festival, and the official soundtrack reached number one on the UK Country Albums Chart.

  In 2019 she played Lyudmila Ignatenko in Chernobyl, the HBO and Sky UK miniseries about the 1986 disaster and its clean-up. The five-part series drew 19 nominations at the 71st Primetime Emmy Awards.

  She then appeared in Judy, a biographical drama based on the life of the American actress Judy Garland.

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• 6. Dark Turns

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  Four films carrying her name reached audiences in 2020. They were Dolittle, directed by Stephen Gaghan, The Courier, directed by Dominic Cooke, and Misbehaviour, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe. The fourth was the surrealist psychological thriller I'm Thinking of Ending Things, directed by Charlie Kaufman for Netflix.

  Critics lauded her work in the Kaufman film, and it earned her a Best Actress nomination at the 30th Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards. That same year she played the nurse Oraetta Mayflower in the fourth season of the FX crime series Fargo.

  In The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal's first film as a feature director, Buckley played the younger Leda Caruso while Olivia Colman played the older version. It opened in a limited release in the United States on the 17th of December 2021 and reached Netflix at the end of the month. Critic Ty Burr called her a "revelation".

  The role won her a Gotham Independent Film Award for Outstanding Supporting Performance and a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. It also brought her first Academy Award nomination, for Best Supporting Actress at the 94th Academy Awards.

  In 2022 she played a widowed woman on a countryside holiday in Alex Garland's folk horror film Men, with Rory Kinnear. It screened in the Directors' Fortnight section at Cannes in May 2022 and reached American cinemas on the 20th of May 2022 through A24.

  In June 2021 she had joined Frances McDormand, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy and Ben Whishaw in Women Talking, Sarah Polley's adaptation of Miriam Toews's bestselling novel. It opened in limited release in the United States and Canada on the 23rd of December 2022. The next month she joined the voice cast of the animated Scrooge: A Christmas Carol, which reached Netflix that December.

  She then reunited with Olivia Colman in Wicked Little Letters, directed by Thea Sharrock. She also replaced Carey Mulligan as the lead in Fingernails, Christos Nikou's English-language debut, with Riz Ahmed and Jeremy Allen White. Filming took place in Toronto in late 2022, and both films premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.

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• 7. Hamnet

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  In May 2023, it was announced that Buckley would star opposite Paul Mescal in Hamnet, Chloé Zhao's historical drama based on the novel of the same name. The American Film Institute later listed the film among the top ten of 2025.

  Reviewers focused on Buckley. David Fear of Rolling Stone predicted that people "will be talking about Jessie Buckley's performance for years". Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post called her "thunderous, playful, grounded and ethereal".

  The awards followed. She won Best Actress in a Drama at the Golden Globes, then the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actress. She also won the Actor Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role, along with the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

  With those four wins, she became the first Irish actress to take the leading actress prize at all four ceremonies.

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• 8. Music And Public Life

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  On the 15th of April 2022, Buckley and the former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler released "The Eagle & The Dove", the lead single from their joint album. For All Our Days That Tear the Heart followed on the 17th of June 2022 and debuted at number 23 on the UK Albums Chart. The 2022 Mercury Prize shortlisted it.

  Singing has stayed part of her public presence. On The Late Late Show in 2019, she performed Emmylou Harris's "Boulder to Birmingham", a song from the Wild Rose soundtrack. She is also an ambassador for The Matt Talbot Community Trust, which supports people in recovery from addiction.

  When she won the Academy Award, President of Ireland Catherine Connolly called it "an historic moment". She offered her "warmest congratulations" and praised Buckley's contributions to film and theatre.

  Buckley lived in Norfolk, England. In mid-2023 she married Freddie Sorensen, a mental health worker and former television producer, and in 2025 she gave birth to their daughter. In March 2026, on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, she said she had struggled with an eating disorder and depression as a teenager. She credited her love of acting and music with helping her through.

  The same month came news of a duet with Hozier on 20th Century Paddy, a tribute album to the Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan, due on the 13th of November 2026 through Rubyworks. In February 2026 she was announced as one of the title sisters in an adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's novel Three Incestuous Sisters, with Dakota Johnson and Saoirse Ronan. Alice Rohrwacher directs from a screenplay she co-wrote with Ottessa Moshfegh.

  In May 2026 came word that she would again share the screen with Paul Mescal, this time in Benh Zeitlin's drama Hold On to Your Angels.

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