Katie Holmes

Kate Noelle "Katie" Holmes (born December 18, 1978) is an American actress who first achieved fame for her role as Joey Potter on The WB television teen drama Dawson's Creek from 1998 to 2003. Her movie roles have ranged from art house films such as The Ice Storm to thrillers such as Abandon to blockbusters such as Batman Begins.

In early 2005, Holmes began a highly publicized relationship with actor Tom Cruise. In June, two months after they first met, Holmes and Cruise were engaged. Their relationship made Holmes the subject of international media attention, much of it negative, including speculation the relationship was a publicity stunt to promote the couple's films. Holmes, who was brought up as a Roman Catholic, joined the Church of Scientology shortly after the couple began dating. In April 2006, Holmes gave birth to their daughter, Suri. On November 18, 2006, she and Cruise married in Italy.

Acting

Early work

In January 1997, Holmes went to Los Angeles for pilot season, when producers cast and shoot new programs in the hopes of securing a spot on a network schedule. The Toledo Blade reported she was offered the lead in Buffy the Vampire Slayer but she turned it down.Columbia Tri-Star Television, producer of a new show created by screenwriter Kevin Williamson, asked her to come to Los Angeles to audition, but there was a conflict with her schedule. "I was doing my school play, Damn Yankees. And I was playing Lola. I even got to wear the feather boa. I thought, 'There is no way I'm not playing Lola to go audition for some network. I couldn't let my school down. We had already sold a lot of tickets. So I told Kevin and The WB, 'I'm sorry. I just can't meet with you this week. I've got other commitments.

The producers permitted her to audition on videotape. Holmes read for the part of Joey Potter, the tomboy best friend of the title character Dawson, on a videotape shot in her basement, her mother reading Dawson's lines. The Hollywood Reporter claimed the story of Holmes's audition "has become the stuff of legend" and "no one even thought that it was weird that one of the female leads would audition via Federal Express.

Early life

Holmes was born in Toledo, Ohio. She is the youngest in a family of five children (four daughters, one son) born to Kathleen A. (née Stothers), a homemaker and a philanthropist, and Martin Joseph Holmes, Sr. (born 1945), an attorney specializing in divorces. She lived in the Corey Woods section of Sylvania Township, Lucas County, in a brick 1862 Italianate-style home. Holmes siblings are Tamera, Holly Ann, Martin Joseph, Jr., and Nancy Kay.

Holmes, baptized a Roman Catholic, attended Christ the King Church and parochial schools in Toledo. Her high school was the all-female Notre Dame Academy, her mother's alma mater, where Katie was a 4.0 student.At St. John's Jesuit, a nearby all-male high school, she appeared in school musicals, playing a waiter in Hello, Dolly! and Lola in Damn Yankees.She scored 1310 out of 1600 on her SAT and was accepted to Columbia University (and attended for a summer session); her father wanted her to be a doctor. Holmes loved reading: "I never feel lonely in a bookstore," she said. A British writer profiling her in 2003 said, "The way Holmes approached her unusual education was as American as apple pie: she went to cheerleading practice, got straight A grades, and made a pledge that she would remain a virgin until marriage.Holmes told her hometown paper The Blade that the three words best describing herself were "honest, determined, and imaginative.

Film

In 2005, Holmes 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 then being Phone Booth, in which she played a supporting role. She lamented "It's not like I have a lot of stuff that's great just waiting for me to sign on to.

Her first leading role came in Disturbing Behavior (1998), a Scream-era Stepford Wives-goes-to-high school thriller, where she was a loner from the wrong side of the tracks. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote her character, Rachel, "dresses in black and likes to strike poses on the beds of pickup trucks and is a bad girl who is in great danger of becoming a very good one.The actress won a MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance for the role, though Holmes said the film was "just horrible.

Holmes played a disaffected supermarket clerk in Doug Liman's acclaimed 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.

In Kevin Williamson's 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 Wonder Boys (2000), directed by Curtis Hanson from the novel by Michael Chabon, Holmes had a small role (six and one-half minutes of screen time) but nevertheless attracted the attention of numerous film critics with her performance as Hannah Green, the talented student who lusts after Professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), her creative writing instructor and landlord. Kenneth Turan of The Los Angeles Times said she was "just right as the beauty with kind of a crush on the old man.

In The Gift (2000), a Southern Gothic story directed by Sam Raimi and starring Cate Blanchett, she played the antithesis of Joey Potter: a promiscuous rich girl having affairs with everyone from a sociopathic wife-beater (Keanu Reeves) to the district attorney (Gary Cole), and is murdered by her fiancé (Greg Kinnear). Holmes did her first nude scene for the film, in a scene where her character was about to be murdered. Of the scene, she said, "I thought it was important to the scene and to the character, I just hope there aren't a lot of pauses on DVD players. Her appearance was lamented by Variety's Steven Kotler: "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 Ohio, the scene met with disapproval, Russ Lemmon writing in The Blade:

“ Toledo's Katie Holmes—whose popularity is probably directly proportional to her perceived level of sweetness and innocence—bares her breasts in The Gift. . . Say it ain't so, Katie. . . Katie's topless scene was gratuitous. It added nothing to the movie . . I hope it added to her checking account, above and beyond what she would have received for appearing fully clothed throughout. I also hope her contract stipulated that she will receive a percentage of DVD rentals and sales. As one Internet writer on roughcut.com put it: Katie's topless scene assures that "The Gift will be the DVD most rented by teenage (and not teenage) boys in the history of freeze frame" . . . It seems to me that the four years that she spent cultivating a wholesome image vanished in just a few seconds—in a potential box-office bomb, no less.

Stage

Holmes made her Broadway debut in the revival of Arthur Miller's All My Sons in September 2008. She opened to mixed reviews. Ben Brantley of The New York Times claimed "the neophyte Ms. Holmes" is a "sad casualty" of director Simon McBurney's "high concept approach" to the play. He adds that "Ms. Holmes delivers most of her lines with meaningful asperity, italicising every word". Clive Barnes of the New York Post was similarly unimpressed by Holmes - and had few compliments for her co-stars. He wrote, "Lithgow starts in a sunny, benign fashion, but eventually finds himself screeching alongside Holmes, looking tough under a glossy wig." However, The New York Daily News' Joe Dziemianowicz was won over by the actress' first stint on stage, writing, "Holmes, a TV and film vet, makes a fine Broadway debut. Her rather grand speech pattern takes getting used to, but she seems comfortable and adds a fitting glint of glamour. In 2009, Holmes appeared in the National Memorial Day Concert on the Mall in Washington, D.C. in a dialogue with Dianne Wiest celebrating the life of an American veteran seriously wounded in Iraq, José Pequeño.

Personal life

Holmes bought a townhouse in Wilmington in 2002. When Dawson's Creek ended its run in 2003, she moved to Los Angeles, California, then New York City in 2005, before going back to Los Angeles when she married Tom Cruise. Holmes dated her Dawson's Creek co-star Joshua Jackson early in the show's run. After the relationship ended peacefully, she told Rolling Stone, "I fell in love, I had my first love, and it was something so incredible and indescribable that I will treasure it always. And that I feel so fortunate because he's now one of my best friends. Holmes met actor Chris Klein in 2000. A Midwesterner like Holmes—he grew up in Illinois and Nebraska—Klein and Holmes were engaged in late 2003, but in early 2005 she and Klein ended their relationship. Press accounts cited the distance imposed by their careers as a factor. In the fall of 2005, Klein said of the split, "We grew up. The fantasy was over and reality set in.Holmes told a reporter in 2005, "Chris and I care about each other and we're still friends.

In July 2009, Holmes, Nigel Lythgoe, Adam Shankman, and Carrie Ann Inaba announced the launch of a dance scholarship fund called the Dizzy Feet Foundation.

Holmes in the media

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 "Big Spender" from Sweet Charity. On the November 9, 2003 episode, she was Punk'd by Ashton Kutcher and the next year she was the subject of an episode of the MTV program Diary.

Holmes was annually named by both the British and American editions of FHM magazine as one of the sexiest women in the world from 1999 forward. She was named one of People's "50 Most Beautiful People" in 2003; its sibling Teen People declared her one of the "25 Hottest Stars Under 25" that year; and in 2005, People said she was one of the ten best dressed stars that year.She has appeared in advertisements for Garnier Lumia haircolor, Coach leather goods, and clothing retailer The Gap.

Relationship with Tom Cruise

Weeks after her relationship with Chris Klein ended, Holmes began dating actor Tom Cruise. Their first public appearance together was on April 29, 2005, in Rome, at the David di Donatello Awards, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars. Her family expressed support, with her father stating, "We're very excited for Katie", and saying his daughter was "a very mature young lady with a good head on her shoulders. From all we have read and heard about Cruise, he's a humanitarian and a real class act. From the perspective of a parent, we're very excited for both of them".Holmes's sister Tamera said, "They're both wonderful people.

Scientology

Holmes, who was raised a Roman Catholic, joined the Church of Scientology shortly after the couple began dating. Soon after beginning her relationship with Cruise, Holmes fired her long-time manager and agent and acquired a new "best friend", Jessica Rodriguez, who is from a prominent family of Scientologists. Robert Haskell, who wrote W magazine's cover story on the actress, said Rodriguez "was described to me as Holmes's 'Scientology chaperone' and it was clear that she would be on hand during our interview despite my protests. This was in contrast to Holmes's earlier press, which noted approvingly she "arrives without the ubiquitous PR person in tow.

Suri Cruise

On April 18, 2006, Holmes gave birth to a baby girl named Suri. The Los Angeles Times summarized the written statement Cruise released on the birth, saying the name "is a word with origins in both Hebrew and Persian. In Hebrew, it means 'princess' and in Persian, 'red rose,' it was claimed in the release. Although some Hebrew linguists had never seen the word for "princess" spelled this way and its meaning, others said it was a Yiddish pronunciation of the Hebrew name Sarah.

Until September 2006, Suri had not been seen in public, which led to tabloid stories questioning the existence of the child, contrasting Holmes and Cruise to other celebrity couples with newborns such as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Typical was the US Weekly cover story "BABY MYSTERY: Best friends' visits denied, baby photos cancelled, a wedding delayed, and Katie in seclusion.