Yael Stone was born and raised in Sydney, New South Wales, the daughter of Judy, a nurse, and Harry Stone, an architect.[1] Her father was born in Czechoslovakia, to Holocaust survivor parents.[2] Stone's father is from a Jewish family and her mother, who is of Romanian descent, converted to Judaism.[3][4] Her brother, Jake Stone, was the lead singer of the band Bluejuice. Her sister, Elana Stone, is also a musician.[5]
She was a sickly child, spending periods in hospital with asthma and pneumonia, so did not participate in sport. She took speech and drama lessons with a local woman, Robin Fraser, who encouraged her to develop her skills in performing and writing.[6]
Stone began acting as a child, with roles in the film Me Myself I and the miniseries The Farm.[5]
She then worked primarily in theatre. At the 2008 Sydney Theatre Awards, she won the awards for Best Newcomer and Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The Kid.[8] From 2010 to 2011, she appeared in The Diary of a Madman (a theatrical adaptation of the Gogolshort story), a role for which she was again nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Sydney Theatre Awards.[8] In February 2011, she travelled to New York City to perform in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's production of The Diary of a Madman,[8] before returning to lead roles in A Golem Story, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and As You Like It in Sydney.[5]
She also worked in television, including supporting roles in All Saints and Spirited.[5]
Stone moved to New York permanently in December 2011 and co-founded an experimental theatre company.[5] After four months in New York, she was cast in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, a show set in a women's prison.[7] Stone plays Lorna Morello, a prisoner from Boston; her accent, a mixture of Brooklyn and Boston,[9] was called "the most amazing accent on television" by a journalist for The New Republic,[10] while another reviewer deemed the role to be Stone's "breakout turn".[11] She reprised her role in the show's second season,[12] and was billed as a series regular in the third season.[13]
In 2012, she married Australian actor Dan Spielman and the couple moved to New York.[11] In July 2017, Stone announced that her marriage had ended over a year earlier.[15]
Stone started dating Jack Manning Bancroft, founder of Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience. In November 2017, they announced they were expecting their first child.[16] and their daughter was born in the following year.[17] They had a second child in 2022.[18]
On 16 December 2018, The New York Times published an interview with Stone in which she accused Australian actor Geoffrey Rush of sexual misconduct during the production of The Diary of a Madman in 2010 and 2011, including inappropriate texts and unwanted touching.[19] Rush responded in a statement to the Times through his attorneys.[20][21]
On 7January 2020, midway through the 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season, Stone announced her intention to give up her US green card and return to live permanently in Australia and become involved in the "climate war".[22]
