Sarah Connor

In 1984, Sarah is a waitress in Los Angeles living a pretty unremarkable life. Then the news reports women with her name being killed one after another. She realizes she's being followed and hides in a nightclub, where the Terminator finds her. She's saved by Kyle Reese, a soldier from 2029.

Kyle tells her Skynet will start a nuclear war and that her son, John, will lead the Resistance against the machines. Sarah only believes him after watching the cyborg tear through an entire police station. On the run, they grow close and spend a night together at a motel. The Terminator mimics her mother's voice on the phone to track them down. At the factory Kyle dies, and it's Sarah, wounded, who crushes the machine in a hydraulic press. Pregnant, she records tapes for her son and heads into Mexico.

In 1995, Sarah is locked up at Pescadero State Hospital after trying to blow up a computer factory. No one believes Judgment Day is coming on August 29, 1997. She trains in her cell, tries to escape and clashes with Dr. Silberman, who thinks she's insane. Ten-year-old John lives with foster parents.

When the T-1000 appears, John and a reprogrammed T-800 come to get her. Sarah struggles to trust a machine with the face of the one that nearly killed her. After dreaming of a nuclear blast over a playground, she goes alone to kill Miles Dyson, the Cyberdyne engineer. In front of his family, she can't pull the trigger. With Dyson's help, she destroys the lab. At the steel mill, she's the one who lowers the T-800 into the molten steel. On the road, she thinks that if a machine can learn the value of human life, maybe people can too.

In 1998, three years after Cyberdyne, Sarah and John are living in Guatemala, believing they won. A T-800 sent before Skynet was erased walks into a beach bar and kills John in front of her.

Sarah spends the next two decades adrift, drinking and hunting Terminators. She gets anonymous messages with the place and time of each arrival, always signed “For John,” and she's wanted by the authorities. In 2020 she intercepts the Rev-9 on a highway and joins Dani Ramos and Grace. When the messages lead them to Texas, she learns they come from Carl, the same T-800 that killed her son. She wants to destroy him but accepts his help against the Rev-9. After the battle at the dam, she stays with Dani to get her ready for the war.

In the Terminator 3 timeline, Sarah is no longer alive. She died of leukemia years earlier, and Judgment Day didn't happen in 1997. John lives off the grid, still afraid of the future she warned him about.

Sarah was cremated in Mexico. At her mausoleum, her friends followed her will and filled the casket with weapons. John, Kate Brewster and the Terminator use that arsenal to fight off the police and the T-X.

In the timeline of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which follows T2 and ignores T3, Sarah and John are hiding in 1999. The Terminator Cromartie finds them, and Cameron, a reprogrammed Terminator, saves them. A time jump takes the three of them to 2007. There Sarah learns Judgment Day wasn't stopped, only delayed.

Sarah, played by Lena Headey, starts hunting the pieces that will become Skynet, like the Turk, a chess computer. Along the way she deals with Derek Reese, Kyle's brother, and FBI agent James Ellison, who slowly realizes she's right. She also fears she has cancer.

In Terminator Genisys, Sarah's life changes from childhood on. In 1973, at age 9, she loses her parents to a T-1000. A T-800 sent by someone unknown saves her and raises her. Sarah calls him Pops.

When Kyle arrives in 1984, Sarah, played by Emilia Clarke, already knows everything, knows how to fight, and she's the one who saves him. She refuses to accept a fate already written. With Kyle and Pops, she jumps to 2017 to stop Genisys from launching and faces her own son, turned into a machine. With Cyberdyne's headquarters destroyed, she moves on with Kyle, free to choose what comes next.

Linda Hamilton plays Sarah in the 1984 and 1991 films and in 2019's Terminator: Dark Fate, and voices the tapes in Terminator Salvation. Lena Headey plays her in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Emilia Clarke in Terminator Genisys.