NEW YORK — Sutton Foster has spent more than two decades headlining Broadway marquees, but the loudest stretch of her public life has nothing to do with a stage. As her relationship with Hugh Jackman moves from rumor to red carpet to permanent tabloid fixture, the two-time Tony winner used a Women’s Health Lab panel in New York this month to say something her industry rarely admits out loud. She feels alone.
Speaking at the third annual Women’s Health Lab, hosted by Hearst Magazines in partnership with Northwell’s Katz Institute for Women’s Health on May 18 at The New York Historical, Foster joined ABC News chief medical correspondent Dr. Tara Narula and ELLE senior digital director Claire Stern Milch for a panel titled The Science of Staying Strong: Longevity, Movement & Resilience. The conversation was billed as a discussion of stress, fitness and aging. What landed instead was a confession.
“I’ve been a leading lady for a long time,” Foster told the room, “but often I feel really alone.”
The remark, first reported by Women’s Health and picked up over the following week by Geo News, The Nightly and other outlets, has been read as a quiet response to the storm currently swirling around her personal life. Foster, 51, confirmed her romance with Jackman, 57, in early 2025 after the pair starred together in the 2021 to 2023 Broadway revival of The Music Man. Their first red carpet as a couple came in October, their 2026 Met Gala debut on May 4 drew tabloid coverage on three continents, and reports this month from New Idea and Woman’s Day have positioned Jackman’s ex-wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, as wanting a meeting with Foster for what one source called “closure.”
Foster did not name Furness on the panel. She did not have to.
“I reached out to a lot of my contemporaries last year, and a lot of the women on Broadway, and we all are usually on our own,” she said. “Everyone shared the commonality of loneliness.” She pivoted from the personal to the structural, addressing what she described as the industry’s habit of placing successful women in opposition to one another. “Women of power can actually support each other, and we don’t have to be pitted against each other,” she said. “There’s room for more than just one of us.”
The framing matters. Until this month, the Foster Jackman story had largely been told through anonymous sources, paparazzi frames and reports anchored to Furness’s camp. Reporting from The Nightly noted the panel was the actress’s most direct on-the-record discussion of her own state of mind since the romance went public.
The Women’s Health Lab itself was a heavyweight booking. Hearst’s May 19 announcement, distributed through PRNewswire, listed Foster alongside Laura Dern, Jessica Capshaw, Heather Gay, Chelsea Gray, Keke Palmer, Maria Shriver and Jenna Wolfe, with editors from Cosmopolitan, Delish, ELLE, Oprah Daily, Prevention and Seventeen moderating panels on cognitive health, longevity, caregiving and mental health. Lilly served as title sponsor. The invitation-only event was anchored by Northwell’s Katz Institute for Women’s Health, lending the day a clinical spine rather than a wellness-influencer veneer.
Foster used the platform to roll out her own venture. She has begun leading a wellness retreat at Canyon Ranch in Lenox, Massachusetts, called “Leading Women,” built around fitness, nature, creativity, play and what she called spirituality. The concept, she said on the panel, came from a chance encounter with a former elementary school classmate now working at the resort. The initial pitch landed her in a familiar internal argument. “Who am I to lead a wellness retreat?” she said she asked herself, before flipping it. “Who am I not to?”
The retreat’s anchor word is community, and Foster traced it back to the loneliness conversations she had with other Broadway leads over the past year. The first edition of the Canyon Ranch program ran earlier this month, with a roster limited to thirty guests and sessions led with the New York fitness studio The Limit, where Foster moonlights as an instructor. “It is not only a place where I get physically strong,” she said of the studio, “but I feel like it pushes me to a limit where I go, if I can do this, I can do anything.”
That has not made the bigger life easier. Foster told the panel her wellness rebuild had emerged from the wreckage of past burnout cycles, and that she was now trying to manage time before her body forced the issue.
“I’m making some really conscious decisions. I’m saying no more, which is really hard,” she said. “I think in the past I’ve waited for like extreme burnout, or, like, my body breaks down and I’m sick. So I’m really trying to take the conscious pause to slow down and recalibrate my life in a very conscious way.”
Dr. Narula, who co-directs the Women’s Heart Program at Northwell’s Lenox Hill Hospital and recently published The Healing Power of Resilience, spent the panel walking through what unmanaged stress does inside the body, from the hypothalamus down through the adrenal glands to the cardiovascular impact, and pushed back on the idea that resilience means refusing to break. “Strength is about, to me, being molded, almost as if we are clay,” she said. “Things are going to happen to us, but we allow ourselves to be broken a little bit, and reshaped, and reformed into something that’s new.”
It is the kind of language Foster appeared to absorb in real time. Asked about her own daily stress-management practice, she offered the smallest possible answer. She takes a bath every night, lights candles, and likes a twinkly light. She journals. She tries to be outside. She thinks of her schedule, she said, like a stovetop. “What’s on the burners, what’s cooking, what’s on fire, what needs to be taken off the burner, what’s marinating?”
The bath jokes traveled fast. The loneliness line traveled faster.
Foster’s career sits at an unusually high crossover altitude for the comments to register the way they have. She won the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical in 2002 for Thoroughly Modern Millie and again in 2011 for Anything Goes, with five additional nominations in between and after. She carried Younger on TV Land and Paramount+ for seven seasons. Her most recent Broadway run was as Princess Winnifred in the acclaimed 2024 revival of Once Upon a Mattress at the Hudson Theatre. In March, according to Deadline, she signed with Range Media Partners for representation, a move that typically signals a push into more film and prestige television work.
The Jackman of it all complicates that path. Their relationship timeline has been picked apart in tabloid columns since November 2024, when the first report of an alleged affair during the Music Man run surfaced. Jackman and Furness, married for 27 years, announced their separation in September 2023, and finalized their divorce in June 2025. Reports this month claim Jackman has grown frustrated with what he sees as several mutual friends, including Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts and Nicole Kidman, aligning with Furness. Kidman, according to a Woman’s Day account, avoided the couple at the May 4 Met Gala.
None of that came up by name on the Women’s Health panel. None of it had to. The room understood the subtext, and so did the people who clipped Foster’s quotes for the next news cycle.
What Foster offered instead was the most usable response a public figure can give when the noise around them gets loud. She named the feeling, attached it to a community of peers she said share it, and pointed to a project she has built to address it. The wellness retreat will return to Canyon Ranch later this year. The Broadway calendar will pull her back in due course. The tabloid cycle, on current evidence, has no intention of slowing down.
“There’s room for more than just one of us,” she said again, near the end of the panel, the line landing now as both wellness gospel and quiet rebuttal. It is the kind of sentence that reads like a slogan in print and like a warning shot at the same time, depending on who is reading.
For more on Foster’s career and life, see Eastern Herald’s Sutton Foster profile.
