Sarah Jeanette Connor is a fictional character and protagonist of the Terminator franchise. She is portrayed by Linda Hamilton in the films The Terminator (1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Terminator Salvation (2009; voice only), and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), as well as the theme park attraction T2-3D: Battle Across Time (1996). Other actresses to portray the character include Emilia Clarke in the film Terminator Genisys (2015) and Lena Headey in the television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008–09).
The character develops from a timid damsel in distress victim in the first film to a wanted fugitive committing acts of terrorism, a hardened warrior and mother who sacrificed everything for her son John Connor's future, on the verge of losing touch with her own humanity, and a mentor preparing and protecting a protégée for her destiny.
In an alternate timeline, depicted in Terminator Genisys, she is in her younger years, raised by a Terminator, while in another alternate timeline, depicted in Terminator: Dark Fate, she hunts numerous rogue Terminators (from various alternate timelines) in the years following her son's death.
Terminator film series
The Terminator (1984)
Sarah is a Los Angeles college student and waitress who is pursued by a relentless android assassin, the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger). She learns she is in danger from a televised report of two identically named Los Angeles women who were shot to death earlier that day. She is rescued from the Terminator by time-travelling soldier Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who says that in the future, an artificial intelligence called Skynet will be created by military software developers to make strategic decisions.
The program will become self-aware, seize control of most of the world's military hardware (including highly advanced robots), and launch an all-out attack on human beings. John Connor will eventually lead the remnants of the world's military and survivors, The Resistance, to victory, only to discover Skynet has invented a means of time travel and sent an android killer back in time to destroy John's mother before he is born. John is Sarah's future son; he sends back a trusted sergeant, Kyle Reese, to protect his mother. During their brief time together, Kyle tells Sarah that she will be responsible for training John in the skills and tactics he will use to fight Skynet.
Kyle protects Sarah from the Terminator and they flee together. Initially, she is unaware that Reese has been in love with her. While they are avoiding the Terminator, Sarah grows to reciprocate his feelings, and they consummate their relationship, resulting in John's conception. Kyle dies fighting the Terminator in a factory. Sarah crushes the Terminator in a hydraulic press. Kyle's sincerity and courage inspire her to develop the skills and abilities that make her a suitable mentor and teacher to John. After these events, Sarah, pregnant and a fugitive, begins making a voice recording to give to John later in life. While recording the tape, a boy takes a photograph that he sells to her; John will give this to Kyle in the future before sending him back in time.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Sarah and her son John (Edward Furlong) have been separated; John is now ten years old and living in a foster home with Todd and Janelle Voight, and Sarah has been institutionalized at a prison hospital of the criminally insane after trying to destroy a tech research firm. In the years since the previous film, she has become a muscled, ferocious warrior. After the death of Kyle Reese, Sarah takes his warnings and the responsibility of raising her son to heart. Her fixation on the disaster and her fanatical desire to keep John safe has made her mentally unstable and very violent, which is aggravated by her fear and hatred of the Model 101. She lives off-grid to protect herself and John. Sarah lived as an outlaw and tried to teach her son the skills he would need to lead the resistance. She is captured and sent to a psychiatric prison hospital ward (of the criminally insane) after trying to blow up a computer factory. Several times at the hospital, she has tried to improve her behavior in hope of getting to see her son, but the criminal psychologist Dr. Silberman does not believe her. Her activities and claims of fighting evil robots from the future led to her being deemed incurable.
Sarah only seemed to confirm the judgment of psychiatrists by committing acts of violence against hospital staff. She tries to escape multiple times; during her final escape attempt, Sarah encounters two Terminator models; the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), a liquid metal android sent back to kill her son, and the Model 101 (Schwarzenegger) that was sent back by John's future self (Michael Edwards) to protect them. When the Model 101 (or T-800) comes to the hospital ward with John, she flees in terror and is almost captured by the hospital staff, but she goes with the android who tells her "come with me if you want to live." They escape in a police car after knocking the driver unconscious. Sarah finds it nearly impossible to accept that the Model 101 is benevolent; throughout the film she remains hostile towards it. John develops a bond with it, resembling a father-son relationship. In the director's cut of the film, Sarah has an opportunity to destroy the machine's CPU. She nearly does so but John persuades her that they will need its help.Terminator 2: Judgment Day transcript
After another horrific nightmare about Judgment Day, Sarah decides to hunt down Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), a computer researcher who works at Cyberdyne Systems and is destined to build the microprocessor that will become Skynet. However, she cannot bring herself to kill a person, realizing that doing so would make her no better than a Terminator herself. Shortly afterwards, John and the Model 101 arrive; with Dyson's help, they destroy all of his research and steal the remains of the first Terminator from the Cyberdyne lab. After the T-1000 is defeated, the Model 101 lets Sarah lower it into a vat of molten steel to destroy it, despite John's protests. Sarah finally gains respect for the Model 101 and offers her hand in friendship before its final sacrifice. Because of this event, Sarah looks to the future with renewed hope.
Alternate ending The alternate ending for Terminator 2: Judgment Day, available on the Ultimate Edition DVD and the Skynet Edition Blu-ray, shows Sarah alive and well 30 years after the primary events of the film. She is an elderly grandmother and John is a Senator in a world in which Skynet was never able to start its war on humanity.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
Sarah Connor has died from leukemia before the events of the 2003 film. Her son John (Nick Stahl) mentions that they were living in Baja, Mexico when she was diagnosed. Her doctor gave her six months to live but she fought the disease for three years, long enough to see the 1997 "Judgment Day" pass without incident. John hit the road on the day Sarah died, and she was cremated in Mexico where her ashes were spread out to the sea. Never truly believing they had beaten Skynet, her friends stored a cache of weapons in a casket in a niche at a Los Angeles mausoleum for John to find in the event that Judgment Day was not averted and the Terminators returned, in accordance with her will. The T-850 (Schwarzenegger) gathered all the weaponry and had to hide John in the casket from police before reuniting with Kate (Claire Danes).
Terminator Salvation (2009)
Linda Hamilton reprised her role as Sarah Connor in (voiceovers only) with warning of the future war, in the form of taped recordings for John (Christian Bale) delivered throughout Terminator Salvation.
Terminator Genisys (2015)
Sarah is portrayed by Emilia Clarke. Willa Taylor, the daughter of the film's director Alan Taylor, has a brief role as Sarah's nine-year-old self. The story takes place in an alternate reality to the continuity of the first four films due to Skynet's (Matt Smith) actions throughout the timeline. Therefore, Clarke's Sarah is an alternate timeline variant of her counterpart portrayed by Hamilton.
In the film, Skynet sends a T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun) to an earlier point in Sarah's life, in 1973, to kill her. Sarah is nine when her parents are killed by it during camping at Big Bear Lake. Sarah is found and raised by a reprogrammed T-800 (Schwarzenegger) sent by an unknown party to be her guardian after her escape. These events result in an altered timeline that erases the events of the earlier films. Clarke's Sarah integrates elements of both Hamilton's portrayal and Furlong's portrayal of John in Terminator 2: Judgment Day; young Sarah teaches the android, which she calls "Pops", how to be more human and forms an emotional bond with the T-800, regarding it as a surrogate father after her parents' deaths.
After the T-1000's attack in 1973, Sarah learns from Pops of her assailant's motive, her destiny as John Connor's (Jason Clarke) future mother, and the Resistance's war against Skynet, including its first attempt on killing her in the original timeline's 1984. Over the next decade, Pops trains Sarah to handle weapons and prepare for her destiny. However, Sarah despises her destiny and wants the ability to choose how to live her life. Because she was trained in combat since childhood, Sarah is not helpless by the time Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) arrives to protect her in 1984. In addition, she is headstrong, assertive, and audacious. Unlike her parallel from the original timeline, that being raised by a Terminator, Sarah has extensive knowledge on Skynet, even able to build a makeshift time machine with Pop, having advanced engineering skills decades ahead of her time. She is not dependent upon Kyle, but rather is fighting alongside him. Sarah initially resents her relationship with Kyle being dictated by fate, but she gradually falls in love with him. Sarah plans to time travel and destroy Skynet to prevent Judgment Day.
Discovering the date of Skynet's initial attack has changed from 1997 to 2017, Sarah and Kyle travel 33 years into the future to stop Skynet and their alternate version of John, who had been compromised by Skynet and was changed into a cyborg known as the T-3000. After John's defeat and the prevention of Skynet from spreading to computer servers worldwide, Sarah, Kyle and Pops prepare to face an unknown future, unaware that Skynet is now self-aware in Cyberdyne's underground facility.
Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
Hamilton reprises the part of Sarah Connor as the lead character in the 2019 film Terminator: Dark Fate, a direct sequel to Terminator 2 (thus ignoring the events of Terminator 3 and Terminator Salvation). In this timeline, the rise of Skynet is averted, but it dispatched various other Terminators into the past prior to its erasure from history, with the result that John was killed by another T-800 in Guatemala in 1998. Grieving and bitter, Sarah succumbs to alcoholism, and spends the intervening decades hunting down other Terminators based on anonymous texts sent by an unknown figure that direct her to the time and place that they will arrive, allowing her to eliminate them before they can pose a threat. Since the attack on Cyberdyne Systems, Sarah is wanted by the entire United States' authorities.