Cathryn Stringer is a nurse who works 12-hour shifts. She has been married to the Broadway actor Joshua Henry since 2012, they have three sons, and last year the two of them agreed that he would take the lead in Ragtime only if he could play it seven times a week rather than the usual eight.
Lincoln Center Theater said yes. On 7 June, Henry won the Tony Award for best leading actor in a musical for that performance as Coalhouse Walker Jr. The production closed at the Vivian Beaumont on 16 August. The seven-show week closed with it.
Table of Contents
The basics
| Detail | On the record |
|---|---|
| Name | Cathryn Stringer. Playbill, The New York Times and her own Instagram account use Cathryn Henry |
| Job | Nurse. She was working at NewYork-Presbyterian in New York as of 2018 |
| Married | 20 October 2012, so 14 years next month |
| How they met | University of Miami, living across the hall from each other |
| Children | Samson, 8, and twins Max and Leo, 5 |
| Home | New Jersey |
| @cathenry101, set to private |
Three things the search results get wrong
- Samson was born in March 2018, not October. Wikipedia says October while citing a Playbill report published on 20 March that year, and celebrity sites have copied it. He is eight, not seven.
- She is not an actress, whatever the Instagram aggregator page near the top of Google says.
- No published source gives her age. Henry posted a birthday message to her on 30 April this year and did not mention one.
Across the hall in Miami
Henry was in his final year at the University of Miami. Stringer was a year below him and lived across the hall. Talking to Broadway.com’s Show People, he described meeting her at the elevator, noticing her red hair, and thinking she looked like the girl on the Wendy’s logo.
He graduated in 2006, drove a Penske truck from Florida to New York and moved into a basement apartment in Washington Heights. The two spent a year apart before she came north, Henry said in a 2014 Broadway.com interview during his run in Violet. That piece described her as being from Atlanta and quoted him on the marriage: “She keeps me grounded.”
They married on 20 October 2012. Photographers had been taking their picture together since June 2011, starting at the Ford’s Theatre gala in Washington.
A birth on her own ward
Samson Peter Henry was born at around nine in the morning in March 2018, in the hospital where his mother worked. A New York Times profile published that May called it a sort of bring-your-child-to-work situation.
His father was in previews for Carousel at the Imperial Theatre. Henry told the paper that “like a good boy he came on the day off,” the one day that week he was not performing.
The following night he had to sing Soliloquy, the seven-and-a-half minute number in which Billy Bigelow imagines the child he has not met yet. He had slept about two hours. Jack O’Brien, who directed the revival, said the song broke open in him that weekend, and the production later cut a scene so the first act would end there.
They had found out she was pregnant the previous summer, while Henry was playing Aaron Burr on the Hamilton tour. Dear Theodosia, Burr’s promise to his newborn daughter, turned into something he was singing to his own child.
The pandemic, the twins and a song about her
When New York shut down in 2020, Stringer took shifts with Covid patients. Henry was at home writing, and she was the one telling him to stop putting the album off. Grow came out in September 2021 with a fourth track called Awe Of Her.
Max and Leo arrived on 21 March 2021. “Cathryn is my hero,” Henry wrote when he announced their birth, adding that he could not be more in awe of her. She replied underneath, joking that he was ageing like fine wine and that next time it would be triplets, then added in capitals that she was kidding.
What Henry says about her
Stringer has never given an interview. Almost everything on the public record about her comes from her husband, usually on their anniversary in October or her birthday in April.
On their twelfth anniversary, in 2024, he called her his greatest teammate. In April this year he called her the queen of queens, praised her as organised and outdoorsy, and thanked her for loving him back when he was eating off the Wendy’s dollar menu.
Seven shows instead of eight
Broadway runs on eight performances a week. Henry told TODAY in May that Ragtime was the first job of his career with a seven-show week, that he and Cathryn had decided the family needed a better balance, and that he is not going back. “She does 12-hour shifts as a nurse,” he said of his wife in the same interview.
The year took a toll anyway. Henry wrote on Instagram about the ache of missing one of his five-year-olds at soccer while he was away for the Met Gala. There were three wake-ups in one night before a show, the last at 5am. None of the boys has watched him on a Broadway stage, because the parts he has taken lately are too dark for them.
Stringer went with him to the Met Gala on 4 May. The next morning, Henry told the Associated Press, the two of them were on FaceTime from their hotel to the boys, who wanted to hear about the party. They hung up and missed his nomination being announced.
What Henry said at the Tony Awards
At Radio City Music Hall on 7 June, in a speech carried live on CBS, he thanked her by name.
“Thank you for putting our kids to bed.”
He thanked her for dreaming with him when it had been hard, and for her love and her sacrifice. Then he went through the boys, giving each a title: Samson the champion, Leo my hero, Max the great. The broadcast cut to Stringer in the audience with both hands over her face. She nodded, then blew a kiss towards the stage.
Since the curtain came down
Ragtime finished on 16 August with four Tony Awards, including best revival of a musical.
Henry posted a video from the school run on 3 September. Ten days later he sang two concerts in one day at Enlow Recital Hall in Hillside, about half an hour from the family’s home, and the week after that he played two nights in Indianapolis. He says he is writing a book as well.
Previews for The Conversation, a musical about a long relationship that he co-wrote with Julia Harriman and performs with her, begin at the Astor Place Theatre on 17 November, and it opens on 7 December. Before any of that, on 20 October, the couple reach 14 years of marriage.
