Facts about January Jones
January Jones Biography
January Jones — yes, that’s her real name — played Betty Draper, the jittery wife (and then ex-wife) of Don Draper in the television series Mad Men.
January Jones grew up in South Dakota, and when she turned 18 she moved to New York to be a model. She then went into acting in Los Angeles, making her first film appearances in the late ’90s in the films All the Rage (1999) and The Glass House (2001) and Bandits (2001). After years of playing pretty blondes in the background, she had a lead role in the horror film Taboo (2002), in the TV movie Love’s Enduring Promise (2004), and played Matthew Fox‘s wife in the film We Are Marshall (2006).
The next year she landed a plum role in Mad Men in 2007. The show became a huge cable TV hit, making stars of Jones, Jon Hamm (who played Don Draper), and many of their co-stars.
January Jones’s other films include Anger Management (2003, starring Adam Sandler), Love Actually (2003), Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004), Pirate Radio (2009, starring Bill Nighy and also known as The Boat That Rocked), the mistaken-identity thriller Unknown (2011, with Liam Neeson), and the western Sweetwater (2013). She also played the troubled mother of a figure skater in the 2020 Netflix series Spinning Out.
Extra credit
January Jones gave birth to a son, Xander Dane Jones, on September 13, 2011. It was Jones’s first child. She has refused to publicly identify the father.