Biography
Sutton Foster first built her reputation as a Tony Award-winning performer through luminous leading parts in stage musicals, later extending her reach into movies, television series, and independent albums. Her Tony victories arrived with the star-making turn in Thoroughly Modern Millie in 2002 and the 2011 Broadway revival of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. Wish, her initial solo collection issued in 2009, registered on the Billboard Heatseekers chart, while she also drew attention for the lead in the comedy-drama Bunheads, which ran from 2012 to 2013, and for the title role in Younger beginning in 2015.
Foster entered the world in Statesboro, Georgia, in 1975 and grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. Her older brother, the Tony-nominated actor Hunter Foster, preceded her on stage. At fourteen she joined the children’s chorus for a Detroit mounting of La Bohème; a year later she competed on the television program Star Search. She departed Troy High School early to join the touring company of The Will Rogers Follies and completed her diploma through correspondence courses. A short enrollment at Carnegie Mellon University followed, yet she soon withdrew to devote herself entirely to theater work.
In 1995 Foster portrayed Sandy on a national tour of Grease and stepped into the same role as a replacement when the show reached Broadway the following year. She next appeared in the ensemble of The Scarlet Pimpernel before creating the central character in Thoroughly Modern Millie, which arrived on Broadway in April 2002. The Jazz Age musical captured the Tony for Best Musical and delivered Foster her first leading-actress prize. Over the ensuing seven years she earned three additional Tony nominations for originating Jo in Little Women (2005), Janet van de Graaff in The Drowsy Chaperone (2006), and Princess Fiona in Shrek: The Musical (2009).
While performing in Shrek, Foster issued her debut solo album, Wish, a Ghostlight Records set of folk-pop and theater covers recorded with music director Michael Rafter at the piano. An Evening with Sutton Foster: Live at the Cafe Carlyle appeared in 2011. That same year she received another Tony nomination for her interpretation of Reno Sweeney in the 1934 Cole Porter revival Anything Goes, a production that ultimately won Tonys for Best Revival of a Musical, Best Choreography for Kathleen Marshall, and Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical for Foster herself.
Foster had already begun making guest appearances on such series as Flight of the Conchords and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In June 2012 she became a series regular on ABC Family’s Bunheads, a comedy-drama set in a ballet school that produced eighteen episodes before its cancellation in 2013. She next took the title role in Violet, which opened at the American Airlines Theatre in 2014 and brought her a sixth Tony nomination for leading actress. That year she made her feature-film bow with a supporting part in The Angriest Man in Brooklyn. In 2015 she starred in the James Roday comedy-horror picture Gravy and simultaneously launched a multi-season run as the lead of TV Land’s Younger. Days before the program’s fifth season premiered in June 2018, she released her third album, Take Me to the World, on Ghostlight; the songs reflected the recent arrival of her daughter with husband Ted Griffith, a Hollywood screenwriter.
Foster entered the world in Statesboro, Georgia, in 1975 and grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. Her older brother, the Tony-nominated actor Hunter Foster, preceded her on stage. At fourteen she joined the children’s chorus for a Detroit mounting of La Bohème; a year later she competed on the television program Star Search. She departed Troy High School early to join the touring company of The Will Rogers Follies and completed her diploma through correspondence courses. A short enrollment at Carnegie Mellon University followed, yet she soon withdrew to devote herself entirely to theater work.
In 1995 Foster portrayed Sandy on a national tour of Grease and stepped into the same role as a replacement when the show reached Broadway the following year. She next appeared in the ensemble of The Scarlet Pimpernel before creating the central character in Thoroughly Modern Millie, which arrived on Broadway in April 2002. The Jazz Age musical captured the Tony for Best Musical and delivered Foster her first leading-actress prize. Over the ensuing seven years she earned three additional Tony nominations for originating Jo in Little Women (2005), Janet van de Graaff in The Drowsy Chaperone (2006), and Princess Fiona in Shrek: The Musical (2009).
While performing in Shrek, Foster issued her debut solo album, Wish, a Ghostlight Records set of folk-pop and theater covers recorded with music director Michael Rafter at the piano. An Evening with Sutton Foster: Live at the Cafe Carlyle appeared in 2011. That same year she received another Tony nomination for her interpretation of Reno Sweeney in the 1934 Cole Porter revival Anything Goes, a production that ultimately won Tonys for Best Revival of a Musical, Best Choreography for Kathleen Marshall, and Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical for Foster herself.
Foster had already begun making guest appearances on such series as Flight of the Conchords and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In June 2012 she became a series regular on ABC Family’s Bunheads, a comedy-drama set in a ballet school that produced eighteen episodes before its cancellation in 2013. She next took the title role in Violet, which opened at the American Airlines Theatre in 2014 and brought her a sixth Tony nomination for leading actress. That year she made her feature-film bow with a supporting part in The Angriest Man in Brooklyn. In 2015 she starred in the James Roday comedy-horror picture Gravy and simultaneously launched a multi-season run as the lead of TV Land’s Younger. Days before the program’s fifth season premiered in June 2018, she released her third album, Take Me to the World, on Ghostlight; the songs reflected the recent arrival of her daughter with husband Ted Griffith, a Hollywood screenwriter.
Albums
Singles
I Got Love / Gimme Gimme (feat. Darcie Roberts)
2018
I'm on My Way / On My Way (feat. Megan McGinnis, Darcie Roberts, Jodi Cotton, Johnna Tavianini, Elizabeth Truitt & Ball State Cabarat Class Female Singers)
2018
Stars and the Moon
2018
Live
