Katie Holmes

Kate Noelle Holmes (born December 18, 1978) is an American actress.

At age 14, she began classes at a modeling school in Toledo which led her to the International Modeling and Talent Association (IMTA) Competition held in New York City in 1996.

Eventually, Holmes was signed to an agent after performing a monologue from To Kill a Mockingbird.

Holmes made her film debut with a supporting role in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997).

An audition tape was sent to the casting director for the 1997 film The Ice Storm, directed by Ang Lee, and Holmes made her big-screen debut in the role of Libbets Casey in the film, opposite Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver.

In January 1997, Holmes went to Los Angeles for pilot season, when producers and cast 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 in order to finish high school.

Columbia TriStar Television, producer of a new show named Dawson's Creek that was 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."

Holmes won the part.

Paul Stupin, executive producer of the show, said his first reaction on seeing her audition tape was "That's Joey Potter!"

Creator and executive producer Kevin Williamson said Holmes has a "unique combination of talent, beauty and skill that makes Hollywood come calling. But that's just the beginning. To meet her is to instantly fall under her spell."

Williamson thought she had exactly the right look for Joey Potter.

"She had those eyes, those eyes just stained with loneliness."

While Dawson's Creek was met with mixed reviews, Holmes attained national attention.

Holmes was soon on the covers of magazines such as Seventeen, TV Guide, and Rolling Stone.

Jancee Dunn, an editor at Rolling Stone said she was chosen for the cover because "every time you mention Dawson's Creek you tend to get a lot of dolphin-like shrieks from teenage girls. The fact that she is drop-dead gorgeous didn't hurt either."

She first achieved fame as Joey Potter on the television series Dawson's Creek (1998–2003).

A mixture of parts in big-budget and small-scale film projects came next, including Disturbing Behavior (1998), Go, Teaching Mrs. Tingle (both 1999), Wonder Boys, The Gift (both 2000), Abandon, Phone Booth (both 2002), The Singing Detective, Pieces of April (both 2003), First Daughter (2004), Batman Begins, Thank You for Smoking (both 2005), Mad Money (2008), Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010), Jack and Jill (2011), Miss Meadows (2014), Woman in Gold, Touched with Fire (both 2015), Logan Lucky (2017), Dear Dictator (2018), Coda (2019), Brahms: The Boy II, and The Secret: Dare to Dream (both 2020).

During her time as a series regular on Dawson's Creek, Holmes's first leading role in a film came in 1998's Disturbing Behavior, a Scream-era Stepford Wives-goes-to-high school thriller, where she was a loner from the wrong side of the tracks.

The film was recut from what the director intended.

Roger Ebert, then of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote of 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."

Despite the fact that it received mixed reviews and was not a huge financial success, the actress won a MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance for the role and also received a Saturn Award nomination for the part.

Holmes, though, said the film was "just horrible."

In 1999, she played a disaffected supermarket clerk in Doug Liman's ensemble piece Go.

Holmes's marriage to actor Tom Cruise, which lasted from 2006 to 2012, led to a great deal of media attention.

She has one child, a daughter, with Cruise.

Holmes was born in Toledo, Ohio.

She is the youngest of five children born to Kathleen, a homemaker and philanthropist, and Martin Joseph Holmes Sr., an attorney who played basketball at Marquette University under coach Al McGuire.

She has three sisters and one brother.

Holmes was baptized a Roman Catholic and attended Christ the King Church in Toledo.

She graduated from the all-female Notre Dame Academy in Toledo (also her mother's alma mater), where she was a 4.0 student.

At St. John's Jesuit and St. Francis De Sales, nearby all-male high schools, Holmes appeared in school musicals, playing a waitress 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 become a doctor.

Outside of film, Holmes made her Broadway theatre debut in a 2008 production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons.

In 2011, she portrayed Jacqueline Kennedy in the television miniseries The Kennedys, a role she reprised in The Kennedys: After Camelot (2017).

She also played the part of Paige Finney on the third season of Showtime's Ray Donovan in 2015.

Holmes made her directorial debut with the 2016 film All We Had, in which she also starred, following in 2022, by her second movie Alone Together.