Kate Jackson says she is ready to act again after a 20-year hiatus, telling a crowd at PaleyFest in Hollywood on April 6, 2026, that the idea of returning has her feeling “pretty jazzed about it.” The 77-year-old appeared at the Dolby Theatre with her Charlie’s Angels costars and said she was nervous to be back in a setting like that after so long away.
Jackson told PEOPLE that she had kept her Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild of America cards active during the break, a sign she never fully closed the door on a return. “When the phone rings and somebody’s got an idea and I start thinking about acting again, I’m getting pretty jazzed about it,” she said. She also said she knew her life had changed forever after watching the pilot in a Florida motel room and that Charlie’s Angels cost her and her costars their privacy totally.
The show made Jackson a star in the 1970s, but the attention that followed helped push her away from the business. She said the production’s 12-hour workdays were part of the grind, and that her choice after adopting her son Charles in 1995 was clear: motherhood came first. Her time away was also shaped by a breast cancer diagnosis in 1987, a recurrence in 1989, a partial mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, plus open-heart surgery to correct a cardiac deficiency.
For the past two decades, Jackson has lived on 128 acres in Virginia, where she said she has chickens and a couple of horses and described her home as beautiful, quiet and peaceful. She also recently took a ski trip to Colorado that ended with a fall and back injuries that sent her to physical therapy. What she is signaling now is not a nostalgic one-off but a real opening: after years built around recovery, privacy and family, Jackson is again listening when the phone rings.
