Not only does Katey Sagal play a super mom on our TV screens; she also is one in reality when it comes to her three adorable children, Sarah Grace White, Jackson James White, and Esme Louis Sutter. The actress hit the limelight when she starred as Peg Bundy in the 1987 to 1997 dysfunctional family sitcom Married… with Children. She has since continued to feature in other movies and TV series, most recently joining the cast of Roseanne spin-off, The Conners.
Sagal played mom to Hailey Steinfield in 2015’s Pitch Perfect 2 and Karen Peralta, Andy Samberg’s mother, in the popular comedy cop series Brooklyn Nine-Nine. As a mother of three herself, you can tell that playing matriarchs on TV comes easy. Turning the spotlight on her children, here’s what we know about them.
Katey Sagal’s marriages
Sagal has been married four times, with three children from two of those marriages. She and musician Freddie Beckmeier were married from 1978 to 1981, followed by Fred Lombardo (another musician) from 1986 to 1989, drummer Jack White from 1993 to 2000 (with whom she would give birth to daughter Sarah Grace and son Jackson James), and writer/producer Kurt Sutter in 2010, the two of them having daughter Esme through a surrogate three years earlier.
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She and Sutter met through a mutual friend, and the couple got things kicking from there. “He asked me if I would have coffee with him sometime, and I said yes, and then I was kind of out of touch, because I had my little kids and was running around with my children,” she recalled. “And then he called me like a couple of months later and asked me to coffee, and we went and kind of never left each other after that.”
Her two daughters
Of Esme, Sagal shared with People Magazine in 2007 why she and Sutter opted for surrogacy. “I’d had some medical issues after the birth of my other two children, so I was unable to carry a child, so we were always looking at alternative approaches,” she explained. “We headed down the adoption road at the same time we were investigating the surrogacy road and left it up to whatever happened first, because we weren’t attached to either. Our surrogacy situation just fell into place really easily.”
Fifteen-year-old Esme, youngest of the pack, prefers less attention as a celebrity kid, only occasionally dropping an Instagram post. Understandably, her parents may want to keep her out of the spotlight anyway due to her age. On the other hand, her eldest daughter from her marriage to Jack White, Sarah Grace, has followed her mother’s path and been featured in shows like NCIS, The Bastard Executioner, and, right alongside Katey, Rebel.
Jackson chooses acting over drumming
Jackson, her second child, started as a drummer in his dad’s path before discovering acting was his place. “I was a drum major and I hated it,” he told People. “I was so distracted and all over the place, I was barely taking any regular classes. I got to college and I realized that I wanted discipline, something structured that I had to be accountable for. Acting was the thing that let me do that.”
He began acting in 2017, with his first role in Alex Israel’s SPF-18 as Ash Baker. Since then, he has starred in other productions like The Middle, SEAL Team, and Mrs. Fletcher. He also received positive recognition on one of his most recent films, The Space Between, where he played Charlie Porter.