Saving the life of a calf during a breech birth before dawn.
About: Jacqui de Jong
Jacqui de Jong is a Swedish-Australian actress raised on a working farm in East Gippsland. After leaving home at thirteen on academic scholarships, she studied Shakespeare at Cambridge before moving to New York City to pursue her acting career. Also qualified as a New York attorney, Jacqui brings the natural vitality of her rural upbringing, formidable intelligence, and an artist’s emotional sensitivity to every role.
From Farm to Stage: An Unconventional Journey
At thirteen, Jacqui packed her life into a suitcase and left her family’s working farm in East Gippsland. Academic scholarships carried her from rural Victoria to boarding school and eventually Cambridge. The determination was already there—formed by drought, bushfire, and dawn starts.
Jacqui feeding out cattle with her brother.
Jacqui and her Yamaha XL 250 Farm Motorbike.
2019/2020 Australian Black Summer bushfires approaching the farm.
The Foundation: East Gippsland
Growing up on a working farm with its own mechanical workshop shaped everything. Between eucalyptus forests and the wide horizons of rural Victoria, Jacqui learned to rebuild fences after bushfires, help save calves during breech births, and operate farm machinery with confidence.
Straining fence wires to rebuild after the 2019/2020 Australian Black Summer bushfires with farmhand.
Digging fence post holes after the 2019/2020 Australian Black Summer bushfires with farmhand.
Swimming in farm dams, riding dirt bikes through paddocks, and working alongside her father in the workshop—this was her classroom before any formal education.
But even while moving cattle and mending fences, she was composing stories in her head, finding rhythm in the rain on corrugated iron, drama in the seasonal cycles of farm life.
Responding to an emergency situation.
Counting cattle from the top of the fence.
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, United Kingdom.
Academic scholarships took Jacqui from rural Victoria to boarding school, where she trained in classical piano to concert level and found new imaginative worlds in literature. At Cambridge, studying Shakespeare gave language to emotions she had first observed in rural life.
The Leap: Scholarships and Shakespeare
The Craft: Method and Multilingual
Now based in New York City and trained in the Strasberg Method by David Gideon, Jacqui draws on lived experience and physical fearlessness. She speaks Japanese and is authorized to work in the United States, European Union, and Australia.
Her vintage-inspired aesthetic, featured in Forbes, isn’t costume but autobiography—rooted in treasures found in her grandmother’s farmhouse and refined through international modeling work.
The Artist Today
Jacqui is an actress first. Her work brings together the physical confidence of farm life, the discipline of classical training, and an instinct for emotional truth. She is equally at home driving a tractor or delivering Shakespeare.
Her performances carry the steadiness of someone who has rebuilt after devastation, the grace of classical training, and the curiosity to keep asking what lies beneath the surface.
Professional Representation:
Theatrical: Dulcina Eisen Associates
Commercial: Tracy Goldblum & Doug Kesten, Brady, Brannon & Rich
Management: Ami Manning, Volition Entertainment