The daughter of British actor Griffith Jones, Gemma (born Jennifer) Jones found almost immediate employment after her graduation for RADA. Within a year, she was appearing in London's West End alongside Peter O'Toole in "Baal" (1963) and she primarily concentrated on her stage career over the next three decades. Among her many notable performances were Portia in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" (1964-65), "Saint Joan" (1966), Ophelia to Richard Chamberlain's "Hamlet" (1969), Blanche Du Bois in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1975), Goneril in "King Lear" (1989) and, more recently, Sonya in "Tolstoy" (1996), opposite F. Murray Abraham. Jones toured throughout the world in the early 1970s with Peter Brook's famed production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and returned to the US with the National Theatre's 1994 production of "The Winter's Tale".
Jones made her screen debut in Ken Russell's visually stunning but somewhat confused "The Devils" (1971). Her additional screen work has been fairly limited. On TV, she has appeared in "The Lie" (1970) by Ingmar Bergman, the thriller "Dial a Deadly Number" (ABC, 1975) and PBS' "Devices and Desires" (1991). On the big screen, Jones was also seen as a physician in "Paperhouse" (1988) and as another 19th century mother in the Merchant-Ivory production "Feast of July" (1995).