Sutton Foster

Sutton Foster met actor Christian Borle while they were in college, and they married in 2006. They divorced in 2009 and remained friends who supported each other's work. Foster later married screenwriter Ted Griffin in 2014, and they adopted a daughter, Emily, in 2017. Foster filed for divorce from Griffin in 2024.

Foster has been in a relationship with her former The Music Man co-star Hugh Jackman since 2025. She is also known for her long-standing interest in crafts, which she discussed in her 2021 memoir Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life. Foster has had three dogs, Linus, Mabel, and Brody, since her Broadway debut.

Foster began taking dance lessons at age four and played the lead in a community-theater production of Annie at age 10. At 15, she competed on Star Search and auditioned for The Mickey Mouse Club. She left high school before graduating to join the national tour of The Will Rogers Follies, then attended Carnegie Mellon University for one year before pursuing theater full-time.

Her early professional credits included touring and Broadway productions of Grease, Annie, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Les Misérables. Her breakthrough came with Thoroughly Modern Millie. Foster was promoted from understudy to the title role shortly before the show's opening at La Jolla Playhouse and continued with the production when it moved to Broadway in 2002. Her performance won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, along with Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards.

Foster followed with leading roles in Little Women, The Drowsy Chaperone, Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein, and Shrek the Musical. She received Tony nominations for each of those productions except Young Frankenstein, and won an Outer Critics Circle Award for playing Princess Fiona in Shrek the Musical.

Foster won her second Tony Award for playing Reno Sweeney in the 2011 Broadway revival of Cole Porter's Anything Goes. She later starred as Violet in the 2014 Broadway production of Violet and as Charity Hope Valentine in the 2016 Off-Broadway revival of Sweet Charity. In 2021, she reprised Reno Sweeney for her London theater debut at the Barbican Theatre, earning a Laurence Olivier Award nomination.

Foster returned to Broadway in The Music Man, playing Marian Paroo opposite Hugh Jackman's Harold Hill. The production ran from 2021 to 2023, and Foster received a Tony nomination and won the Drama League Award for Distinguished Performance. In 2024, she played Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Princess Winnifred in Once Upon a Mattress, which transferred from New York City Center Encores! to Broadway and later Los Angeles.

Her other performance work includes the solo album Wish, the live recording An Evening with Sutton Foster: Live at the Café Carlyle, and the album Take Me to the World. She has also taught theater, including work with Ball State University and New York University's New Studio on Broadway.

Foster made her television breakthrough as Michelle Simms, a former Las Vegas showgirl who becomes a ballet teacher, in the ABC Family comedy-drama Bunheads. She then starred as Liza Miller in TV Land's Younger, which ran from 2015 to 2021. The role became her longest-running television part, with 84 episodes.

Her screen credits also include Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, A Million Little Things, Into the Dark, Doc McStuffins, and Solar Opposites. Her films include The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, Gravy, and filmed stage productions of Shrek the Musical and Anything Goes.

In 2021, Foster published Hooked, a memoir written with Liz Welch about using crafts such as cross-stitching, collage, and crochet to cope with difficult periods. She also creates artwork and has collaborated with visual artist Julien Havard, who worked as her dresser for nine years.