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, Katie 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.
Katie 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.
Katie 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 Holmes 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. Katie Holmes loved reading: "I never feel lonely in a bookstore," she said. A British writer profiling her in 2003 said, "The way Katie 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."
At age 14, she began classes at a modeling school in Toledo run by Margaret O'Brien, who took her to IMTA, the International Modeling and Talent Association Competition held in New York City in 1996. There she found an agent after performing a monologue from To Kill a Mockingbird. An audition tape was sent to the casting director for the 1997 film The Ice Storm, directed by Ang Lee. She was cast in the role of Libbets Casey, in the film which starred Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. Ang Lee told The Blade, "Katie was cast because she had the perfect amount of innocence and worldliness that we needed for Libbets. I was really taken by her wide open eyes. She really is a beautiful girl but there is also a lot of intelligence there and it shows."
