Katie Holmes Biography

Instead, having taken piano and singing lessons from a young age, Katie found her place in theatre, excelling in productions put on at the nun-run Notre Dame Academy, a Catholic all-girls high school her mother had attended before her. As the school's strict codes of conduct saw all the pupils wearing uniform, Katie had little opportunity to think about the likes of clothes and boys, instead focusing on work, excelling in chorus, dance and drama. Her father helped to keep her on the straight and narrow, his size intimidating predatory would-be boyfriends. Consequently, she only ever dated "nice" boys, and never broke her parents' curfew.

With Katie being something of a tomboy, her mother decided that it would be advantageous to let her ambitious daughter enrol at a local modelling and talent school, where she could boost her artistic education (by now Kathleen and Katie's teachers recognised that the girl had real talent) and also learn "proper" manners and sophistication. So, initially against the wishes of Martin, who wanted Katie to become a doctor, the youngster joined Margaret O'Brien's Modeling School in Toledo. Come 1995, this extra tuition would pay off big-time when Katie, along with several other pupils, attended the International Modeling And Talent Association's Hooray For Hollywood convention in New York City. Here, before the talent-scouting panels, she would dance, sing and recite from To Kill A Mockingbird, receiving much acclaim but no offers. Having at the same time read unsuccessfully for a TV commercial, Katie would return to Toledo believing she was not up to standard. Now she would throw herself into acting classes with added vigour (though she'd not neglect her other studies, maintaining a straight-A success-rate).

Unbeknown to Katie, the New York jaunt would actually prove to be a breakthrough. She'd caught the eye of talent manager Al Onorato and he encouraged her to go to Los Angeles to audition for parts. This was TV pilot season, with many companies casting for new shows. And, of course, there was always the chance of a film role. She'd take six weeks off from school but to no immediate avail. Despite her now-supportive father helping her rehearse, she found no work, even missing out in auditions for the soon-to-be mega-hit Scream. But soon she would audition again for Scream's wunderkind writer Kevin Williamson, to career-making effect.

Despite these disappointments, and the fact that she had received no formal theatrical training, Holmes would still strike lucky within six months of her first assault on the film industry, scoring a part in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. Set in Connecticut at Thanksgiving, 1973, this would concentrate on the families of Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver as they casually dabbled in drink, drugs and infidelity. Katie would appear as the love interest of young Tobey Maguire, a spoiled Park Avenue teen and a classmate at the posh New York school he's been sent to. Their relationship would mirror the selfishness and disappointment of the movie's adults as Maguire, desperate to lose his virginity and seeing Holmes as his prime target, tries to jolly her up with drugs only for her to wind up face down and unconscious in his lap - so close yet so far.

Having filmed The Ice Storm in 1996 (the only job where she'd require an on-set tutor), Holmes returned to Notre Dame, graduating the following June. She was auditioning throughout, sending tapes to casting directors, but had been turned down for the likes of mega-soap As The World Turns, and Party Of Five. Now, on the cusp of leaving school, she sent another tape to Kevin Williamson. He was at this point perhaps the hottest property in Hollywood, having hit big with both Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, teen-based horror flicks where good-looking kids avoided the butcher's knife for long enough to gab knowledgeably about popular movies. His plan was to step out of the horror genre and place similar smart and sassy kids in a new TV soap, based on his own youth, to be called Dawson's Creek. The series (hopefully several series) would be based on the up-and-down relationships of four friends - two boys and two girls - with the main focus being on Dawson Leery, a wannabe film director, and his best friend and neighbour Joey Potter.

Joey was the role Holmes was after and, once Williamson had seen her audition tape (made in the basement with mum playing Dawson and Katie at one point asking her, quite weirdly when you think about it, "When do you masturbate?"), that was the role she was asked to fly to Los Angeles and audition for again. This was her big chance, and it says much for Katie's sense of loyalty and decency that she turned it down. At school, she was now set to play Lola in a production of Damn Yankees and the auditions would clash with opening night. So, she decided not to let her friends and colleagues down and nixed the offer from Williamson, as said one of the hottest properties in Hollywood.

Fortunately, Williamson was hot for good reason. He had a very clear vision of the high school characters he wanted and had seen something he liked in Holmes' tape, something he liked so much he delayed the auditions for Joey Potter until Katie was available. Unsurprisingly, she got the part and, just as unsurprisingly, she deferred her entrance to New York's Columbia University. She would defer again a year later, only attending the college in the summer of 2000 for a brief photography course.

Given Dawson's Creek's modern style, where the kids spoke as adults might after years of avid cinema-going and deep therapy (this was Williamson scripting high school life as he would have liked it to've been), and with all action backed by state-of-the-art pop music, industry insiders were initially non-plussed. The show's pilot would thus remain unaired. But the show itself was a near-immediate hit. Warner Brothers' WB Network had been hoping to break into a lucrative and newly-identified teen market and had done so successfully a year earlier with Buffy The Vampire Slayer (Katie had in fact auditioned for the part of Buffy but had been considered too young). Rejected by Fox, Dawson's Creek was snapped up by WB and introduced mid-season, in January, 1998, cunningly paired with Buffy and backed by an unheard-of $3.3 million publicity campaign that saw it advertised on billboards, buses, TV and radio. It appeared on the trailers of movies (most notably Williamson's new hit Scream 2) and its stars were used as models in the latest catalogue for J.Crew.

Onscreen, with Williamson at the helm, the show was bright, witty and, if you could get past the oddly adult tone, exceptionally watchable. The kids would endlessly dissect lives involving jealousy, drunkenness, seances, detention, resentment, lost virginity and complex life-choices, quoting from movies all the way - indeed, some episodes were straight reworkings of hit films. Of course, for many the main attraction was the continually unanswered question of whether Dawson, played by James Van Der Beek, would ever sleep with Katie's Joey, and Williamson kept viewers on tenterhooks for six whole seasons. Wisely, he recognised the importance of this romantic frisson, and had the couple come together, then split, then reunite, as misunderstandings and changing circumstances drove them into the arms of others.

Joey would be a tremendous experience for Holmes, a multi-faceted character and the only one to appear in all 128 episodes of Dawson's Creek. With her mother dead from cancer and her father in jail, Joey would be cute, angsty, verbose, intelligent and often cranky. Rowing over to Dawson's house, she'd do everything he might have expected from a dream lover in a perfect tryst, then pull back at the last second, usually fearful, confused or annoyed. In the meantime, she'd enjoy a relationship with, and lose her cherry to Joshua Jackson's Pacey, the other male member of the show's love quadrangle, then move on to Eddie, a writer and rebel, as the kids grew up, attended college and took their first tentative steps into the world of work. Naturally, the final double episode, set 5 years after the previous one, would be a hugely popular cliffhanger, where Joey would have to finally choose between Dawson and Pacey.

As said, Dawson's Creek was a monumental success, scoring WB's highest ever ratings as, along with Buffy, Felicity and Seventh Heaven, the network crushed its rival Fox's Party Of Five and Beverly Hills 90210. As well as altering the way teens were treated on TV, the show had even changed the way music was used. New deals were struck with publishers where songs featured during episodes were highlighted at the end with a 5-second snippet and a picture of the band's latest CD. Thus charged less for the music, the producers saved a fortune while the bands and publishers gained fabulous advertising space (often the acts featured would be signed to Time Warner, WB's parent company), and some bands actually broke big in this manner, one example being Sixpence None The Richer, their single Kiss Me burning up the charts after soundtracking the Dawson experience.

At the beginning of the show's run, the upfront Holmes would ask out Jackson and they'd engage in an 8-month affair while filming in Wilmington, North Carolina (they'd live here for 10 months of the year from 1997 to 2002, usually shooting for 12 hours a day). Come 1999, she'd be ensconced in a long-term relationship with actor Chris Klein who'd just broken through with Election and, especially, the gross-out comedy American Pie. Hailing from Hinsdale, a suburb of Chicago near to Lake Michigan, Klein came from a very similar background to Holmes. Neither New York sophisticated or LA glitzy, it was just what the fans would expect from Joey Potter, by now a major role model for teenage girls. In the fame stakes, Katie had now utterly outstripped her Dawson's Creek co-stars.

In the meantime, there had been a crazy rush into the movies. During the first season of Dawson's Creek, Holmes had filmed no less than three pictures, a nonsensical work-rate that could not and would not be continued. The first of these was Disturbing Behaviour, directed by David Nutter. In keeping with Nutter's input into The X-Files and Millennium, the movie saw a new boy arrive in a small-town where he comes to suspect that a clean-cut school elite called the Blue Ribbons is actually a gang of brainwashed, often homicidal Stepford Kids. Katie would play Rachel Wagner, a stand-out rebel, who'd help the newcomer in his search for the truth, even though, given her nose-ring and goth gear, she was a prime candidate for Stepfording. Holmes would win Best Breakthrough Performance at the MTV Awards, but still the movie was not up to much.

Far superior would be Go, the latest effort by Swingers director Doug Liman. Structurally inspired by Pulp Fiction, this was an earthy black comedy covering the same weekend from several different perspectives. One of the main plotlines would see store clerk Sarah Polley decide to make a little extra cash by acting as a go-between in a minor drug deal. Unable to pay upfront, she leaves disapproving mate Katie with the dealer as human collateral, then the situation goes pear-shaped as, in fear of undercover cops, she flushes the drugs before the deal is made. Now she doesn't have the stash or the money to pay for it. Katie should be in deep trouble, but the dealer's nowhere near as vicious as he makes out and instead he falls for her, the couple making out with an exuberance that would have shocked the more straight-laced fans of Joey Potter. This was entirely in keeping with the movie's anarchic spirit as it charged through a seedy, sexy world of pumping raves, topless bars and even kinky partner-swapping, featuring Ally McBeal's dependably slutty Jane Krakowski.

After she'd briefly popped up, along with Joshua Jackson, as Joey and Pacey in Muppets From Space, where she was outrageously propositioned by Clifford the Rastafarian, there'd be the high school-set comedy-drama Teaching Mrs Tingle, written and directed by Holmes' now-mentor Kevin Williamson. The film had understandably had its release date delayed and its title changed in the wake of the Columbine massacre, Killing Mrs Tingle clearly being no longer appropriate. Here Helen Mirren would star as the hateful, sarcastic, cruel and spiteful teacher of the title, Katie playing an honours student who desperately needs to score big in Mirren's class in order to make Valedictorian. Unfortunately, she has little chance as Mirren seems ever-keen to ridicule and humiliate her. So when Holmes is caught with stolen exam papers, she knows she'll be expelled, so she goes to beg for Mirren's mercy but inadvertently ends up kidnapping her and tying her to a bed while she works out what to do with her (probably unbeknownst to Williamson, this is actually quite a common fantasy amongst British males).

Despite the plot's inherent tension, the movie, like 1997's rather similar Suicide Kings, was unfortunately rather lifeless. Nevertheless, from Holmes' point of view it had given her a chance to work with one of the greatest actresses of modern times. Very sensibly, she'd realised that, though a hugely successful young actress, she had not really earned her position. Her lack of training and experience weighed upon her and drained her confidence. So she decided that she would do best to take small roles in movies featuring mature performers of proven talent. Mirren was clearly one, so were Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr, who she joined in her next big screen outing, Wonder Boys. This, Curtis Hanson's follow-up to the Oscar-winning LA Confidential, saw Douglas as an English professor in the midst of his third divorce, an affair with chancellor Frances McDormand and a 7-year struggle to complete his latest book. His life then gets even more complex as he's drawn by moody and compulsively lying pupil Tobey Maguire into a chaotic and professionally dangerous situation where McDormand's dog is killed and Marilyn Monroe's wedding suit is stolen. In a minor role, Katie would appear as a form of decoy love interest. A student renting a room in Douglas's house, she would attempt to seduce him, as well as serving as the object of Maguire's affections, But, despite a strong performance, she was really only there as a distraction. Interestingly, after The Ice Storm, this would be the second movie where she was seen sharing a classroom with Maguire.

Aware of a need to avoid being typecast as a "nice girl" in teen movies, Holmes' was choosing her parts carefully. Having been beaten to the lead in Wicked by Julia Stiles, and also missed out on The Beach (Virginie Ledoyen) and Brokedown Palace (Claire Danes) she'd broken out somewhat with Go. Now she went a step further in The Gift, written by Billy Bob Thornton, directed by Sam Raimi and featuring yet more stellar talent from which Katie could learn her trade - Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reeves and Hilary Swank. Here she'd have a pivotal role as a country club tart who's engaged to school principal Greg Kinnear and enjoying a bit of rough of the side with redneck Reeves. When she disappears without trace, psychic Blanchett is brought in by the cops to help in the search, lakes are dragged, accusations fly and the pot boils nicely. As said, it was a small role for Holmes, but she was impressively dirty, and appeared topless for the first time. Dawson's Creek would last for three more years, but Joey Potter was already dying.

2001 would see no new movies, only a series of TV ads for Garnier. The next year, though, would add two important items to her fast-growing CV. First came Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth, a taut little thriller that saw Colin Farrell as a dodgy control-freak publicist trapped at a street pay-phone by sadistic sniper Keifer Sutherland. The reason he's not using his mobile is that he doesn't want his wife to check the bill and find he's been romantically liaising with a naive but ambitious actress - Holmes, in another small but well-chosen and well-performed part. The movie, also featuring Forest Whitaker as a cop trying to understand what the seemingly insane Farrell is up to, would be a great critical success and, like Teaching Mrs Tingle, would stir up controversy, as the murderous real-life Washington sniper was still at large.

Following Phone Booth would come Abandon, Holmes' first leading role. Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan (an Oscar winner for Traffic, later to write Syriana for George Clooney), this saw Katie as a smart and articulate college student, under severe pressure to pass her exams and score a lucrative corporate position. Two years earlier, her oddball boyfriend disappeared and now cop Benjamin Bratt shows up asking her about the case. Katie begins to fall for Bratt but then starts to see spooky glimpses of her ex-boyfriend around campus. It was a reasonable thriller, well-written and well-played, but it really worked best as a snapshot of contemporary student life.

With Dawson's Creek still popular but running out of steam, it had become all the more important for Katie to establish herself as an adult player. This would certainly have explained why she'd turned down the teen sex comedy 40 Days And 40 Nights and instead took on the film adaptation of Dennis Potter's extraordinary The Singing Detective, perhaps the greatest and most ambitious TV show ever screened. Here Katie's Wonder Boys co-star Robert Downey Jr would take the Michael Gambon role as the hospital-bound patient, suffering a horrible skin condition, whose fevered hallucinations combine with his memories of a traumatic childhood and disastrous marriage to turn his reality into a bizarre world of disappointment, resentment, hilarity and savage drama where anyone, at any point, might burst crazily into a song and dance routine. Katie would appear as Nurse Mills, the role that had originally provided a breakthrough for Joanne Whalley, contributing much of the beauty and decency that ever appears in Downey's environment of ugliness and agony. Obvious financial constraints would force director Keith Gordon to cut the project down from 400 minutes to just over 100, but Katie would still get to use her earlier training in song and dance and, of course, they could never have cut out the fabulous sequence where the bed-ridden anti-hero cannot stop himself from ejaculating in front of her. The greatest of all cum-shots, and not a penis in sight.

Holmes would now move on to Pieces Of April, another high-grade project but this time resolutely indie, being shot for a mere $200,000. Here Katie would star as April Burns, tattooed and punky black sheep, who invites her family to Thanksgiving dinner for the very first time, hoping to impress them and be drawn back to their bosom. As you'd expect from the writer of What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, though, the family, led by the supremely wacky Patricia Clarkson, are hugely, comically dysfunctional. Their journey provides many laughs, as does Katie's behaviour when her oven breaks and she starts suspecting her boyfriend of nefarious doings. But there's some serious twanging of heart-strings, too, as Clarkson is revealed to be suffering from breast cancer. Her performance would see her Oscar-nominated, while Holmes would be nominated for a Golden Satelite Award.

2003 would end with Holmes finally getting engaged to Chris Klein, rumours telling of a $500,000 diamond ring being placed on her finger. All seemed to be going well, until she made a very uncharacteristic choice and agreed to star in First Daughter. Though directed by her Phone Booth co-star Forest Whitaker (usually an interesting artist) and starring Michael Keaton, this was unarguably the kind of teenie pap she'd consciously avoided for years. Yet here she was, playing the President's daughter, going off to college and yearning to be treated as normal, defying her bodyguards, falling for her faculty advisor and going ever-so-cutely off-the-rails. It's not that it was poorly made or performed, just that it was wholly unnecessary and heavily undermined by Chasing Liberty, a Mandy Moore comedy on the same subject, released earlier in the year.

Though it began with an unexpected split from Klein, 2005 would see Katie bounce back with some infinitely superior projects. First, having just appeared beside former Dark Knight Michael Keaton, would come Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, where Christian Bale became the Caped Crusader, the film following his horribly interrupted youth, his training in the dark arts of violence and his early battles with mobsters and super-villains in Gotham City. Having beaten off Natalie Portman and (oh, succulent revenge for that Buffy disappointment!) Sarah Michelle Gellar, Katie would play Rachel Dodson, childhood friend of Bruce Wayne, and now both an assistant DA and the movie's love interest. Once again she'd be learning from some of the greats, this time Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson and Gary Oldman.

The Batman experience would change her life in more ways than one. For a start, the heavy promotional demands would cause her to drop out of Factory Girl, where she was to have played Andy Warhol protegee Edie Sedgwick, the film following her descent from up-market innocence to drug-addled oblivion. On top of all this furore, she became perhaps the world's most sought-after tabloid fodder when, just a few weeks after announcing her split from Chris Klein, she was said to have begun a relationship with Tom Cruise, 16 years her senior. Many were suspicious of the news, considering it to be a publicity stunt to aid the success of Batman Begins and Cruise's War Of The Worlds, both released in June, 2005. Matters were not helped when Cruise appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, bouncing on the sofa and shouting "I'm in love! I'm in love!" While Cruise angrily turned on the cynics, Holmes maintained her dignity as best she could in the midst of such a media whirlwind, simply confirming that the couple were indeed an item.

And, as far as the tabloids went, what an item. In the midst of a media blitz, Cruise would propose to Holmes atop the Eiffel Tower in June, 2006. Soon a baby was on the cards - a daughter named Suri - born in April the next year. With Cruise now increasingly open about his Scientologist beliefs, the papers were packed with articles about the couple, many of them concerning Cruise's supposed power over his new partner. He was forcing her into Scientology against the wishes of her family, it was said, he was forcing her to remain silent throughout their baby's birth. Parade magazine even went so far as to say "she seemed dazed, passive and vacant" when joining Cruise in an interview. The implications were truly unpleasant and at no point based on fact. Nevertheless, Holmes, despite a burgeoning career based on talent, gumption and perseverance, was coming to be seen as "poor little Katie".

2005 year would end with Holmes joining Robert Duvall, Maria Bello and William H. Macy in a fine ensemble cast for Thank You For Smoking, a satirical comedy where Aaron Eckhart played a spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, promoting smoking and receiving death threats while trying to remain a role model to his 12-year-old son. Holmes would play a canny Washington Post journalist on the trail of Eckhart's darkest professional secrets, engaging in an affair with him while also writing an expose of tobacco industry secrets. The movie was well received, but the Cruise connection would cause yet more controversy as it was rumoured he'd used his studio clout to have a sex scene involving Eckhart and Holmes cut from the film. Director Jason Reitman would admit that such a scene had indeed been cut but that this was due to a "technical glitch".

Already Toledo's most famous offspring since Jamie Farr struck big as Klinger in MASH, Katie Holmes is set for even greater things. You'd think, after her straight-laced upbringing and early entry into tough employment, that she'd be a prime candidate to kick back, party on and live a little. Instead she has chosen to share the ultra-disciplined existence of Tom Cruise. Bright, pretty and now fairly well-experienced, with several Oscar-winning productions behind her, it's to be hoped she can defy the media circus surrounding her private life and continue to mature into the actress she still might be.

Dominic Wills