Profile of Katie Holmes on Famous Like Me

Katherine Noelle "Katie" Holmes (born December 18, 1978) is an American actress from Ohio best known for her role as Joey Potter, the tomboy down the titular waterway on The WB television drama Dawson's Creek. Holmes' movie roles have ranged from art house films such as Pieces of April to thrillers such as Abandon. In June 2005, she became engaged to the actor Tom Cruise, which made her the center of international press attention.

Early life and career

Holmes, born in Toledo, Ohio, is the youngest of the five children of Martin, an attorney, and Kathleen Holmes. She lived in Sylvania Township and attended Catholic schools in Toledo, including the all-female Notre Dame Academy. While in high school, she went with her mother to Los Angeles to audition for pilots for television shows. She did not land a television role, but was cast as the character Libbets Casey in the film The Ice Storm (1997), directed by Ang Lee and starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver.

She returned to Toledo but her audition tapes continued to circulate. One reached the producers of a new show created by Kevin Williamson for Columbia Tri-Star Television: Dawson's Creek. Her appointment to read for it was unknowingly set by the producers for the same day as her high school production of Damn Yankees (she was playing Lola), but they permitted her to send a videotape rather than make her miss the show. Holmes read for the part of Joey, the tomboyish best friend of the title character, while her mother read Dawson's lines, including dialogue about sex and masturbation. Holmes won the part. Williamson said "She had those eyes, those eyes just stained with loneliness."

Dawson's Creek

"I'm a lot like Joey," she said. "I think they saw that. I come from a small town. I was a tomboy. Joey tries to be articulate and deny that she doesn't have a lot of experience in life. Her life parallels mine, which is all about new everything--relationships, personnel, perceptions—and about being guarded." Dawson's Creek filmed its first season in the spring and summer of 1997. Holmes moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, where the show filmed, and for a time lived with creator Williamson.

At 5'9" (some sources say 5'7"), the tall brunette enchanted the press. "The Audrey Hepburn of her generation," was one typical comment. Variety, reviewing the pilot, said Holmes "is a confident young performer who delivers her lines with slyness and conviction." So good was Holmes that The New York Times Magazine would claim everyone in Hollywood was looking for the "Katie Holmes type" when casting shows. "The Katie Holmes type," the reporter claimed, "is a throwback to the 1950's: she is a smart girl next door (as opposed to the babe-o-rama blondes)"--the sort represented by her Dawson's Creek co-star Michelle Williams. But her "type" was no less attractive, Arena magazine declaring her "the most coquettishly sexy woman on television. Anywhere."

Dawson's Creek ran from 1998 to 2003 and Holmes was the only actor to appear in all 128 episodes. "It was very difficult for me to leave Wilmington, to have my little glass bubble burst and move on. I hate change. On the other hand it was refreshing to play someone else," she said in 2004. Holmes confirmed that, as is often the case on soaps, the character is a caricature of the actor:

I miss her spirit, and her spunk, and I miss her anxiety. She always had these long speeches about her fears and her future and love. It was a great tool for me personally because I got to get it all out. I was able to psychoanalyze all of it everyday with her and then I wouldn't have to do it on my own. So much of me is in Joey and it really felt like I grew up on television.

Film career

Holmes in 2005 characterized her film career as being a string of "bombs". "Usually I'm not even in the top ten," she said, the highest grossing film of her career at that time being Phone Booth.

Her big break came when she had a role in the movie The Ice Storm (1997) she starred in a part opposite Tobey Maguire. Her first leading role came in Disturbing Behavior (1998), a Stepford Wives-goes-to-high school thriller where she was a loner from the wrong side of the tracks. Holmes won a MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance for the role, though Holmes said the film was "just horrible". Next she was a disaffected supermarket clerk in Doug Liman's stylish ensemble piece Go (1999). She had an uncredited cameo with Dawson's Creek co-star Joshua Jackson in Muppets From Space (1999), which was also filmed in Wilmington. Kevin Williamson's disaffection for his own high school days spawned Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999), which he wrote and directed. Holmes played a straight-A student whose vindictive teacher (Helen Mirren) threatens to keep her from a desperately needed scholarship.

In the academic world of Wonder Boys (2000), the witty and intelligent film version of the Michael Chabon novel, she had only a small role (six and one-half minutes of screen time). Even so, she attracted the attention of numerous film critics with her performance as Hannah Green, the talented creative writing student of pot-puffing Pittsburgh professor and one-hit novelist Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas). Hannah, who is smitten with Grady, is a boarder in his house. In a memorable scene, she offers a critique of his huge, unwieldy 2,611-page second novel, commenting, "Even though your book is really beautiful, it's... very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone's horses, and the dental records, and so on. I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn't make any choices." For Holmes, this role was the right choice, since it became a turning point in her career, demonstrating she could create a film character with depth and dimension when given a sophisticated screenplay.

In The Gift (2000), a Southern Gothic story directed by Sam Raimi and starring Cate Blanchett, she played the antithesis of Joey Potter: a slutty rich girl carrying on with everyone in town, from a white trash wife-beater (Keanu Reeves) to the district attorney (Gary Cole), and who winds up dead for her trouble. Holmes did her first nude scene for the film, baring her breasts in a scene where her character was about to be murdered. Of the scene, she said, "I just hope there aren't a lot of pauses on DVD players." Her appearance deshabille was lamented by Variety's Steven Kloter: "It seems the only time we see a naked woman on screen is when someone like Katie Holmes needs to break with her sanitized WB past and march brazenly into a new future."

In Abandon (2002), written by Oscar winner Stephen Gaghan, Holmes was a delusional and homicidal college student named "Katie." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times commended Holmes' performance and the film's intelligence, but other critics and audiences savaged it. Holmes was the mistress of the public relations flack played by Colin Farrell in Phone Booth (2002) and Robert Downey, Jr.'s nurse in The Singing Detective (2003). Her next starring role was in Pieces of April (2003), a gritty comedy about a dysfunctional family on Thanksgiving. Variety said it was "one of her best film performances."

Holmes played the President's daughter in First Daughter, which was originally to be released in January 2004 on the same day as Chasing Liberty, the Mandy Moore film about a presidential daughter, but was ultimately released in September 2004 to dismal reviews and ticket sales. First Daughter, directed by Forest Whitaker, also starred Michael Keaton as Holmes' father and Marc Blucas as her love interest. The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt called Holmes' character, Samantha Mackenzie, "a startling example of how a studio film can dumb down and neutralize the comic abilities of a lively young star."

In 2005, Holmes played Rachel Dawes, the love interest of the title character in Batman Begins.

Former Upcoming roles

Entertainment Weekly reported in its December 17, 2004 issue that Holmes was to play the murdered wife of Spade Cooley in a biopic written and directed by Dennis Quaid, who is to play Cooley. Also forthcoming is an adaptation of Christopher Buckley's satirical novel Thank You For Smoking about a tobacco lobbyist, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), directed by Jason Reitman. On October 13, 2005 she pulled out of the drama Shame On You in order to focus on her pregnancy.

Filmography

Guest appearances and endorsements

Holmes hosted Saturday Night Live on February 24, 2001, participating in a send-up of Dawson's Creek where she falls madly in love with Chris Kattan's Mr. Peepers character and singing "Hey, Big Spender" from Sweet Charity. Holmes was annually named by FHM magazine as one of the sexiest women in the world from 1999 forward and was named one of People's "50 Most Beautiful People" in its May 12, 2003 issue. Teen People declared her one of the "25 Hottest Stars Under 25" in its June/July 2003 issue. She has appeared in advertisements for Garnier Lumia shampoos and The Gap.

Personal life

Holmes met actor Chris Klein in 2000, and they began dating. They were engaged in 2004, but in early 2005 Holmes and Klein broke off their engagement. Press accounts cited the distance imposed by their careers as a factor.

In April 2005 she started dating actor Tom Cruise, and is reportedly joining the Church of Scientology as a result of his influence. She and Tom Cruise became engaged after he proposed to her in the early morning of June 17, 2005 atop Paris's Eiffel Tower.

Speculation was rampant that the public affair and engagement were merely designed to promote their upcoming movies, War of the Worlds and Batman Begins. A poll in People magazine found that sixty-two percent of its readers believed the Cruise-Holmes affair was a publicity stunt .

However, some have speculated that the engagement is linked to Scientology. Roger Friedman of Fox News claimed that Katie Holmes disappeared for sixteen days in April when even her own family didn't know where she was . The last time she had been seen, Holmes had flown to meet with Tom Cruise for a possible role in Mission Impossible 3. When she re-appeared, Holmes stated she was in love with Tom Cruise and studying Scientology. She fired her long-time manager and agent and acquired a new "best friend," Jessica Feshbach, a prominent member of the Church of Scientology. Feshbach has been called Holmes' Scientology "minder" and has been observed following Holmes everywhere including the bathroom, and openly telling her what to say during interviews . These have led to speculation that Holmes has been coerced or brainwashed into marrying Cruise and promoting Scientology.

On October 5, 2005, it was reported by People magazine that Holmes is pregnant. The birth will be Holmes' first child, and Cruise's first biological child, though Cruise has two adopted children, Connor, 10, and Isabella, 12, from his marriage to Nicole Kidman. Holmes had previously claimed she would remain a virgin until she got married.

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