The Stunning Transformation Of Felicity Jones

Felicity Jones is no stranger to the world of acting — but as of 2025, many people are still just beginning to recognize her body of work. In February 2025, she was nominated for an Oscar for the second time in her career for her moving portrayal of Holocaust survivor Erzsébet Tóth in Brady Corbet's much-celebrated "The Brutalist." However, this is just the latest achievement in an ever more impressive CV. 

Over the years, she's starred in films like "The Theory of Everything," "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," "The Aeronauts," "Inferno," "On the Basis of Sex," and "Albatross," to name but a few, and co-starred alongside the likes of Eddie Redmayne, George Clooney, and Adrien Brody. She has also earned nominations for BAFTAs, Critics Choice Awards, and Golden Globes. She has certainly come a long way from her beginnings in suburban Birmingham, U.K. Here's a closer look at her transformation from a promising Birmingham talent to an award-winning Hollywood star.

Felicity Jones grew up in Bournville, a suburb in the southwest of Birmingham, with her mother and brother. Her parents both worked in journalism and had met at the local paper of Bournville — her mother had a job in the advertising department, while her father worked as a writer. They divorced when she was 3 years old. "I was very close to both my parents, but I grew up with just my mother, and she was a single parent," Jones explained to West Side Mommy in 2017.

Jones, who was, as she told ABC News, a "tomboy" as a child, looks back on her childhood fondly, with a hint of nostalgia for its simplicity. "Looking back on my own childhood, it felt limitless," she said to The Guardian in 2025. "Summer holidays away from school felt like they went on forever. Anything before the smartphone was a utopia because we weren't recording every minute of our experiences."

Felicity Jones found herself drawn to acing at a young age. It all began when she and her friend "begged" their parents to let them join a drama group on the weekends. Soon enough, Jones' father signed her up for a children's acting group run through Central Television, where he worked at the time. "We had this fantastic teacher called Colin Edwards who treated us like we were at RADA," Jones told The Guardian, referring to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, a prestigious British acting school. "If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now."

She may have been just 11 years old, but during her time in the group, Jones learned all about the craft of acting. She learned the plays of Harold Pinter and the method of Stanislavski. She even learned circus skills like juggling. As she told The Lady, "That is where it started."

It wasn't long after joining her drama group that Felicity Jones landed her first professional TV role. She was 11 when she was cast as Ethel, the school bully and a leading role in the children's show "The Worst Witch," which ran on ITV from 1998 until 2001.

While filming the show, Jones moved away from home and lived in a hotel with the rest of the cast — and it couldn't have been more fun. "I look back on that period really fondly," she told Elle in 2021. "I made some incredibly close friends, it was great fun."

Although Jones had a blast filming the show, she is more than happy to admit that her character wasn't exactly nice. While appearing on ITV's "This Morning" in 2019, Jones was shown a clip from the show. Afterwards, she joked that Ethel really was an "awful character" (via Daily Mail).

Although Felicity Jones made her professional acting debut as a young child, she decided against diving head first into acting or attending drama school. Instead, she chose to study English at Oxford University. 

Why? "It didn't feel right to go straight into acting," she said to Time Out in 2013. Another reason she decided to pursue academic studies was family tradition. "There are people in my family who had been before: My great uncle went to Cambridge," she said to Stylist. And there was a third reason Oxford was so appealing — she was able to continue acting while completing her studies. As one of her fellow students recalled to the Cherwell, she was in countless productions at the university. All in all, she has no regrets. "I loved it. I met my best friends there, who I'm still really close to," she told Stylist. "I'm so lucky that I had that experience."

After graduating from Oxford in 2006, Felicity Jones quickly found herself back in the acting world. She landed the leading role in the ITV adaptation of Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey" in 2007. This was followed by an eight episode stint on Channel 4's "Meadowlands." Next up were roles in films like "Flashbacks of a Fool," "Brideshead Revisited," "The Tempest", and "Like Crazy." In 2011, she landed the lead role in "Chalet Girl," a rom-com in which she played a tomboy snowboarder who falls for a rich boy — played by "Gossip Girl's" Ed Westwick – while working at a ski chalet.

"It was one of my first lead roles," Jones said to Stylist, adding, "It's one of those films where we all loved making it. It was so much fun." Luckily, she had done some dry slope skiing as a child with her father and brother. When she got the part, she started getting into skateboarding, too. "I'd always been a bit of a skater girl growing up," she said. "I loved revisiting that and looking at old '90s skate movies."

It's rare to find an outfit that is truly life-changing, but in 2011, that's exactly what happened to Felicity Jones. At the time, she was still new to the industry, having just starred in "Like Crazy" and "Chalet Girl." That year, she attended her first BAFTA Awards ceremony — a big event for any actor breaking into Hollywood. "At the time I was working mainly in British television and theater," she recalled to Harper's Bazaar. As she explained, she had only just had her first "taste of celebrity" at Sundance that year. "Getting invited to the ultra-glamorous BAFTAs, which as a kid in England I'd grown up watching on television, was a real 'pinch me' moment," she said.

For her first major red carpet appearance, Jones found a vintage 1950s black tulle dress. "I loved that the dress had a timeless film-star chic about it without a lot of bells and whistles," she recalled. The actor explained that the dress gave her the confidence she needed to tackle the red carpet — a red carpet that ended up marking a "huge turning point" in her career. "The dress came to symbolize my fledgling independence and marked a period in my life when I started to make my own way in the world and realized that I could make a go of it in Hollywood," she said. She would then go on to wear one of the most stunning red carpet looks in 2015.

Felicity Jones went from project to project throughout the 2000s and 2010s, until 2014, when she landed the leading role in "The Theory of Everything." The film saw her portraying Jane Hawking, the ex-wife of the famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, played by Eddie Redmayne. 

Jones approached the role by pouring through Jane Hawking's book, "Travelling to Infinity: The True Story Behind the Theory of Everything," which formed the inspiration for the film. She also worked with Jane herself. "When you are playing a real person you are building up trust with someone and you want to get their blessing, so I felt that it was my responsibility to be instinctive and to work those things out and not go to her and start asking her really personal questions straightaway," she told The Lady. "It was a gradual process of getting to know each other." Jane later told Jones that she had perfectly captured her voice.

The performance earned Jones her first Oscar nod in the best actress category back in 2015. She found out early in the morning while lounging in her pyjamas. "When I found out I leapt out of bed and phoned my family and friends," she later told Time Out.

Felicity Jones has had a dozens of leading roles in her career — but there were a few leading roles that she turned down along the way. And, as it turns out, turning down these roles proved to be a major turning point. One of these roles was the coveted lead in 2015's "Fifty Shades of Grey," which Jones turned down — just as well considering Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan's salary was surprisingly low. Johnson went on to win the role, which skyrocketed her to Hollywood stardom. Jones also turned down the lead of Snow White in the 2012 film "Mirror Mirror," starring Julia Roberts, so that she could do a small play in London.

For Jones, her focus was always on choosing good projects, regardless of the hype surrounding them. "I was thinking, 'If I keep doing this, am I ever going to work again?'" she told The Telegraph of one of her decisions to turn down a role. "But, each time, I would ask myself: Is it going to be any good? Do I have a sense that the film will work, or resonate with the public? Do I really want to be playing this part every ­single day for months? But, ultimately, it comes down to what the story is that I'm helping to put out into the world." She added, "There's a certain amount of patience required to wait for the right thing."

One major role that Felicity Jones didn't turn down was the part of Jyn Erso in 2016's "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story." The film is set in the "Star Wars" universe just before the film "A New Hope," which kicked off the franchise back in 1977. Jones was eager to snap up this part because she was excited to see a strong female lead in the franchise. "I couldn't believe what an amazing part it was," Jones said to StarWars.com. "Most of the female roles in franchises at that time were supporting roles."

With "Rogue One," Jones found herself thrust into the world of the big Hollywood blockbuster — it was new territory for her. "It was absolutely extraordinary," she said to BBC's Radio 1. "I had pretty much a life-changing experience," referring to the opportunity to work on a magical set like "Star Wars" and then return to day-to-day life. "It's a little bizarre when you get back home ... and you think, 'I've just been talking to a little many-tentacled creature all day. This is a strange, strange life,'" she laughed.

In 2018, Felicity Jones took on another major part inspired by a real-life person. In "On the Basis of Sex," she played the famous US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who championed women's healthcare rights and gender equality. Ginsburg was nicknamed the "Notorious R.B.G." for a reason: She left a long-lasting legacy for women across the country through her contributions to the American legal system.

"We don't have many figures at the moment who we can look up to and she's leading the way," Jones told Stylist, referring to the honor of playing the feminist icon. "It's so important that someone with her beliefs stays on the Supreme Court. We feel continually let down by our leaders, but she's someone we can trust."

Jones was widely praised for her role, with British GQ celebrating the "best courtroom monologue" they'd ever seen, and The Guardian commending her "sweetly idealistic" portrayal of a young Ginsberg. After the heartbreaking death of the real Ginsberg, who died two years after the film's release at the age of 87, Jones paid tribute to her, saying, "She will be missed not only as a beacon of light in these difficult times but for her razor sharp wit and extraordinary humanity. She taught us all so much. I will miss her deeply" (per Entertainment Weekly).

Felicity Jones began dating filmmaker Charles Guard around 2015. The pair married in 2018 in a private ceremony in Gloucestershire, England. You may know some of his work — he directed films like "The Uninvited" in 2009 and 2023's "Dead Shot," which incidentally starred Jones. "We were incredibly fortunate, when she expressed an interest in the film and in what we were working on," Guard told Collider of her involvement in the film.

The pair welcomed their first child, a son, during the COVID-19 lockdown. In 2022, the pair welcomed a daughter. Motherhood was quite the adjustment for Jones. Or, as she put it to The Times, "Parenting is just a rollercoaster of fatigue." She found herself "celebrating that you have got through each day at about 7:05 p.m., and then realizing you have to live your entire life between the hours of 7 and 10:30!" In between raising kids and taking on new roles, Jones also manages to squeeze in her favorite morning routine, which is no easy feat for a parent of two young children.

Throughout her career, Felicity Jones didn't always feel confident — in fact, as she was landing lead after lead, she often felt deeply anxious inside. As she explained to The Times, she was a "highly strung child" who took life very seriously. "You want to achieve certain things and you're quite determined," she recalled. In fact, her anxiety was so bad, it sometimes manifested physically. "I used to get really nervous and worried about things when I was younger and to the point that I'd sort of be vomiting before doing certain exams and things like that — sort of terrible anxiety," she explained to Glamour in 2019. 

Over the years, Jones found that her anxiety began to improve. When she reached her 30s, she realized that she didn't care about things the way she used to — she became "less self-conscious." She added, "That definitely got better as I've got older. And I think you just don't sweat the small things so much, do you?"

Throughout the years, Felicity Jones tried to stay connected to the real world. In fact, she feels it's her duty to do so — especially as someone in the public eye. "There was that old-fashioned idea, years and years ago of a movie star who was this godlike being who never deigned to talk about anything mortal. But that's long gone," she said to The Guardian. 

Instead, she keeps herself firmly grounded in the real world: "I'm a constant news-checker. You can't not be, now. There's such chaos in the world. It seems to be our duty to be informed, to be abreast of things." For Jones, being informed encourages to her to choose roles that sometimes have a political message at their core. She's also not afraid of using her platform to speak out. "I'm not shy of things that have a strong ideology, that are political," she said. When asked about the current political landscape, she said bluntly, "It's a tragedy."

Felicity Jones has moved from one success to another in her career, continually choosing fascinating projects — and 2025 was no different. She starred in "The Brutalist" as Erzsébet Tóth, the wife of a fictional Hungarian brutalist architect named László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody. It was a demanding role. Not only was the epic film over three hours long, her character was also a Holocaust survivor suffering from chronic pain as a result of living in the camps.

For Jones, capturing all of this authentically was hugely important. "I felt my biggest challenge on every level, with all the technical aspects of the character — the accent, speaking Hungarian, her physicality — was to make everything feel as effortless as possible," she told Vanity Fair. Her method? "I had to do lots of homework, lots of repetition, finding what Erzsébet's voice was and just making it feel like it wasn't a distraction."

It seems her work paid off, as Jones earned her second Oscar nod for the role and critics praised it as her best work so far.