Katie Holmes
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Katie Holmes (born December 18, 1978) is an American actress best known as Joey Potter on Dawson's Creek .
Born Katherine Noelle Holmes in Toledo, Ohio, she was the youngest of the five children of Martin, a lawyer, and Kathleen Holmes. She attended Catholic schools in Toledo, including Notre Dame Academy. While in high school, went with her parents to Los Angeles to audition for pilots for television shows. She did not land a television role, but was cast as the improbably named 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, but they permitted her to send a videotape rather than 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. "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 evertyhing--relationships, personnel, perceptions--and about being guarded." Dawson's Creek filmed its first season in the spring and summer of 1997. Holmes to moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, where the show filmed, and for a time lived with Williamson.
The tall (5'9") 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." Dawson's Creek ran from 1998 to 2003. Holmes was the only actor to appear in all 128 episodes.
Holmes's movie career has not been as spectacularly successful as her show. While she often draws great notices, the films tended to be badly reviewed or be box office duds. Her first starring part 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. 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 in 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 and where Holmes played a straight-A student whose vindictive teacher threatens to keep her from a desperately needed scholarship.
In Wonder Boys (2000), the film version of the Michael Chabon novel, she had a small role (six minutes of screen time) as the tenant--and object of lust--of her English professor, played by Michael Douglas. 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 to the district attorney, and who winds up dead for her trouble. Holmes did her first nude scene for the film. 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 (2002).
She had another starring role in Pieces of April (2003), a gritty film about a dysfunctional family on Thanksgiving. In Abandon (2003), written by Oscar winner Stephen Gaghan, Holmes was a delusional and homicidal college student named "Katie." Roger Ebert commended Holmes's performance and the film's intelligence, but other critics and audiences savaged it.
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. First Daughter is directed by Forest Whitaker. Also forthcoming is her appearance in the latest installment of the Batman franchise, Batman Begins.
Holmes hosted Saturday Night Live on February 24, 2001, participating in a hilarious send-up of Dawson's Creek where she falls madly in love with Chris Kattan's Mr. Peepers character. She was Punk'd by Ashton Kutcher in November 2003. She was annually named by FHM magazine as one of the sexiest women in the world from 1999 forward and has appeared in advertisements for Garnier Lumia shampoos and The Gap.
Holmes is (as of late 2004) engaged to actor Chris Klein.
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