Kate Noelle “Katie” Holmes 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.
Holmes was born in Toledo, Ohio. She is the youngest in a family of five children (four daughters, one son) born to Kathleen A. (nee 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.
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.
Her first leading role came in Disturbing Behavior, 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.
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.