Comprehensive information and links about Katie Holmes

Katie Holmes (born December 18, 1978Katie Holmes is an American actress best known for her role as the tomboy Joey Potter on The WB television drama . The part on the teen soap, only her second professional role, made Holmes a star, with the actress receiving tremendous praise from critics, and adoration from fans. Holmes’s movie roles have ranged from art films such as , but she has not found the same success in films as she did on television, the actress admitting most of her films were "bombs."

Weeks after ending a four-year relationship and year-long engagement with actor Chris Klein, Holmes began a highly publicized relationship with actor Tom Cruise in 2005. In June, two months after they first met, she became engaged to Cruise. Their relationship has made Holmes the subject of international media attention, much of it highly negative, the press speculating the relationship was only a publicity stunt to promote the couple's films. Many reports commented unfavorably about the interest of Holmes, a Roman Catholic, in Cruise's religion, Scientology. In October 2005, the couple announced Holmes was pregnant.

table , is the youngest of the five children (four daughters, one son) of Kathleen and Martin Joseph Holmes, Sr. (born 1945), an attorney specializing in divorces.span ) She lived in the Corey Woods section of Sylvania Township, Lucas County, in a brick 1862 Italianate home with a white picket fence.span Her siblings are Tamara (born circa 1968), Holly (born circa 1970), Martin (born 1970), and Nancy (born circa 1975).span Her high school was the all-female Notre Dame Academy, her mother's alma mater, and where Katie was a 4.0 student.span A British writer profiling her in 2003 said "The way 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."span with Molly Ringwald and the three people she most wanted to meet were Pope John Paul II, Senator John H. Glenn, and actress Meryl Streep. She confessed her "secret vices" were Starbucks coffee and jelly beans and the three words best describing herself as "honest, determined, and imaginative."span

At fourteen, she began classes at a modeling school in Toledo run by Margaret O'Brien, who took her to New York City in 1996 to a talent expo. There she found an agent after performing a monologue from (1997), directed by Ang Lee. She was cast in a small role, Libbets Casey, in the film which starred Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. Ang Lee told Holmes's hometown paper, , "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."span

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. 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. "I was doing my school play, . 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 to 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.'"span

The producers permitted her to audition on videotape. Holmes read for the part of Joey Potter, the tomboyish best friend of the title character in , on a videotape shot in her basement, her mother reading Dawson's lines in a scene where the dialogue included talk of sex and masturbation.span 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."span

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!"span . 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."span Williamson thought she had exactly the right look for Joey Potter. "She had those eyes, those eyes just stained with loneliness."span "Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson) and Joey Potter (Holmes) on Dawson's Creek. Jackson was Holmes's first boyfriend."

Joey Potter "is a headstrong, vibrant, wily, sultry, and determined go-getter. And yet, in a gloriously contradictory manner, in spite of her tough-as-nails exterior demeanor, Joey's also a frail, sometimes uncertain, emotionally sensitive, in-need-of-love person," said the show's official book.span , for years had been climbing in Dawson's bedroom window and platonically sharing his bed. Joey's mother had died from cancer when Joey was thirteen and her father, Mike (Gareth Williams), was in prison for "conspiracy to traffic in marijuana in excess of 10,000 pounds.” Her harried and very pregnant sister, Bessie (Nina Repeta), about ten years older than Joey, was raising her while running the Ice House restaurant, where Joey worked as a waitress. described Joey as "kind of an uptight fussbudget—one who's always twisted up over doing the right thing and bungling-up ways to hook up with her crush and across the creek neighbor, Dawson."span

"I'm a lot like Joey," said Holmes. "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 everything—relationships, personal perceptions—and about being guarded." Holmes filmed the pilot of in Wilmington, North Carolina, during spring break of her senior year of high school in 1997.span When the show was picked up by The WB, Holmes moved to Wilmington, where the show filmed.

The tall (5'9")span brunette enchanted the press, writers of both sexes commenting how Holmes was the sort of girl one wants to bring home to meet the parents and to marry.span , reviewing the pilot, said Holmes "is a confident young performer who delivers her lines with slyness and conviction." span would claim everyone in Hollywood was looking to cast a "Katie Holmes type", who, 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

The show was aggressively marketed by The WB Network before its premiere in January 1998. The cast was featured in the J. Crew catalog and trailers for the program were shown in movie theatres. Before the premiere, the show's talk of sex caused a stir in the press; one of the show's producers, Procter and Gamble, withdrew after negative press in its hometown newspapers.span 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."span said the characters "just talk like they came from a planet ruled by Manhattan psychologists, one where small talk is punishable by death."span , I have to get my dictionary and call people to make sure I'm pronouncing some of the words correctly."span The show brought her national attention and many fans back home; Toledo's Thanksgiving Day parade in November 1998 had record attendance when Holmes was named grand marshal.span ran from 1998 to 2003, and Holmes was the only actor to appear in all 128 episodes. "It was very difficult for me to leave Wilmington, to have my little glass bubble burst and move on. I hate change. On the other hand it was refreshing to play someone else," she said in 2004.span Holmes confirmed that, as is often the case on soaps, the character was a caricature of the actor:

dlI miss her spirit, and her spunk, and I miss her anxiety. She always had these long speeches about her fears and her future and love. It was a great tool for me personally because I got to get it all out. I was able to psychoanalyze all of it everyday with her and then I wouldn't have to do it on my own. So much of me is in Joey and it really felt like I grew up on television.span , Holmes "has had seismic influences on teen life . . . Through it all, Joey has managed to hang on to her integrity. . . The show—and Katie's character in particular—has touched a nerve."span

Film career

In 2005, Holmes characterized her film career as being a string of "bombs." "Usually I'm not even in the top ten," she said, the highest grossing film of her career at that time being She lamented "It's not like I have a lot of stuff that's great just waiting for me to sign on to."span -goes-to-high school thriller where she was a loner from the wrong side of the tracks. Roger Ebert 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." span The actress won a MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance for the role, though Holmes said the film was "just horrible."span (1999), which was also filmed in Wilmington. Kevin Williamson's disaffection for his high school days spawned (1999), which he wrote and directed. Holmes played a straight-A student whose vindictive teacher (Helen Mirren) threatens to keep her from a desperately needed scholarship.span (2000), directed by Curtis Hanson from the novel by Michael Chabon, Holmes had a small role (six and one-half minutes of screen time) but nevertheless attracted the attention of numerous film critics with her performance as Hannah Green, the talented creative writing student of Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas).span (2000), a Southern Gothic story directed by Sam Raimi and starring Cate Blanchett, she played the antithesis of Joey Potter: a slutty rich girl having affairs with everyone from a white trash wife-beater (Keanu Reeves) to the district attorney (Gary Cole), and is murdered by her financé (Greg Kinnear). Holmes did her first nude scene for the film, baring her breasts in a scene where her character was about to be murdered. Of the scene, she said, "I just hope there aren't a lot of pauses on DVD players."span s Steven Kotler: "It seems the only time we see a naked woman on screen is when someone like Katie Holmes needs to break with her sanitized WB past and march brazenly into a new future."span

Toledo's Katie Holmes—whose popularity is probably directly proportional to her perceived level of sweetness and innocence—bares her breasts in The Gift. . . Say it ain't so, Katie. . . Katie's topless scene was gratuitous. It added nothing to the movie . . . I hope it added to her checking account, above and beyond what she would have received for appearing fully clothed throughout. I also hope her contract stipulated that she will receive a percentage of DVD rentals and sales. As one Internet writer on roughcut.com put it: Katie's topless scene assures that "The Gift will be the DVD most rented by teenage (and not teenage) boys in the history of freeze frame" . . . It seems to me that the four years that she spent cultivating a wholesome image vanished in just a few seconds—in a potential box-office bomb, no less.span (2002), written by Oscar winner Stephen Gaghan, Holmes was a delusional and homicidal college student named "Katie." Roger Ebert of the , the Mandy Moore film about a presidential daughter, but was ultimately released in September 2004 to dismal reviews and ticket sales. , directed by Forest Whitaker, also starred Michael Keaton as her father and Marc Blucas as her love interest. 's Kirk Honeycutt called her character, Samantha Mackenzie, "a startling example of how a studio film can dumb down and neutralize the comic abilities of a lively young star." span , she played Rachel Dawes, an attorney in the Gotham City district attorney's office and the childhood sweetheart of the title character.

Forthcoming roles

Holmes is to play the wife of Spade Cooley, who was stomped to death by the country singer, in a biopic written and directed by Dennis Quaid, who is to play Cooley.span about a tobacco lobbyist played by Aaron Eckhart, whom Holmes's character, a Washington reporter, seduces. , screening the film at the Toronto Film Festival, wrote one of the film's "sole relatively weak notes [came] from Holmes, who lacks even a hint of the wiliness of a ruthless reporter."span where she falls madly in love with Chris Kattan's Mr. Peepers character and singing "Hey, Big Spender" from magazine as one of the sexiest women in the world from 1999 forward. (See Category:FHM lists.) She was named one of co-star Joshua Jackson for several months early in the show's run, the relationship ending amicably. She told , "I fell in love, I had my first love, and it was something so incredible and indescribable that I will treasure it always. And that I feel so fortunate because he's now one of my best friends."span Holmes met actor Chris Klein in 2000. A Midwesterner like Holmes—he grew up in Illinois and Nebraska—Klein and Holmes were engaged in late 2003, but in early 2005 she and Klein ended their relationship. Press accounts cited the distance imposed by their careers as a factor.span

Weeks later, Holmes began dating actor Tom Cruise. Their first public appearance together was on April 29 in Rome, Italy, at the David di Donatella Awards, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars.span . Her family expressed support. Her father said "We're very excited for Katie" and said his daughter was "a very mature young lady with a good head on her shoulders. From all we have read and heard about [Cruise], he's a humanitarian and a real class act. From the perspective of a parent, we're very excited for both of them." span

Holmes, a Roman Catholic, began to "embrace" the Church of Scientology as a result of Cruise, a longtime member of and outspoken advocate for the church. On May 23, Cruise appeared on , jumping on Winfrey's couch and vocally declaring his love for Holmes. He went backstage and pulled the embarrassed actress onto the program.span columnist Richard Roeper to write of these events in a piece with the disbelieving title "Admit it, you're curious: Is Tom Cruise nuts or what?" claiming everyone had been asking him questions about Cruise's sanity.span Cruise proposed to Holmes in the early morning of June 17 atop Paris's Eiffel Tower; she accepted.span At the press conference, attended by Holmes's mother, during which Cruise announced the news he declared "Today is a magnificent day for me. I'm engaged to a magnificent woman."span

Gossip columnists dubbed the pair "TomKat." Articles doubting the actors' sincerity and speculating the very public relationship was artifice designed to promote the actors' upcoming films noted that Cruise has been extremely private about his personal life and the flaunting of his new relationship was a marked contrast from his past behavior; the series of "bombs" Holmes has appeared in; the succession of actresses Cruise has dated since his divorce from Nicole Kidman, e.g. Penelope Cruz and Sofia Vergara; and Holmes's recent breakup.span published a story with the skeptical headline "I Love You With All My Hype" and compared the relationship to the public relationships of actors Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter.span was equally dubious, claiming "If this is a romance, it looks more like a tireless campaign, and he seems less like a man giddily in love than an overbearing used car salesman. It may also explain why few seem to be buying whatever it is Cruise is working so hard to sell."span quoted an observer. "One minute, they were having a professional meeting. The next they were lovers." span pairing that was cooked up in a backroom with the stars, their reps and various image consultants in attendance. Had you been a fly on the wall, you might have heard, "OK, Tom, you get to be linked with an actress in her mid-20s to help people forget that even actors who can open blockbusters are not immune from the aging process. Katie, you get the boost of being associated with a hunky superstar as your career is starting to gain steam. Just sign right here."span

Cruise's sister and publicist, Lee Anne DeVette, protested the talk of a stunt. "I don't understand it. It's just insane. There's nothing going on here except that there's a man and a woman who are dating each other and are exceptionally happy."span

Concern has also been voiced about Holmes and her relationship to Scientology. Roger Friedman of the Fox News Channel claimed Holmes had flown to meet with Tom Cruise for a possible role in , was out of contact with her friends and family for sixteen days, then reappeared with Tom Cruise, declaring her love for the actor.span The actress fired her long-time manager and agent and acquired a new "best friend", Jessica Rodriguez, a prominent member of the Church of Scientology described as part of its "royalty." Rodriguez has been referred to as Holmes’s Scientology "minder" as she follows the actress everywhere and tells Holmes what to say during interviews. Robert Haskell, who wrote magazine's cover story on the actress, said Rodriguez "was described to me as Holmes's 'Scientology chaperone' and it was clear that she would be on hand during our interview despite my protests."span . This was a contrast to Holmes's earlier press, which noted approvingly she "arrives without the ubiquitous PR person in tow."span Some claim Holmes has been coerced or brainwashed into marrying Cruise and promoting Scientology. A fan of the actress from Ohio established a web-site, Free Katie, promoting this theory, the site claiming to be "devoted to rescuing sweet Katie from the clutches of the mad scientologist Tom Cruise!"

Even before Holmes's engagement, her hometown paper was already speculating about "what happens if our very own 'good ole Katie' morphs into 'Katie Holmes, the former actress now better known as Tom Cruise's third wife.'"span sent a reporter to Toledo who found the citizens felt the biggest star from their city was not Holmes, but Jamie Farr, who played Corporal Maxwell Klinger on . "I think he's bigger than Katie. He's so humble and he's so proud of his hometown—he name-drops it all the time. If it wasn't for Jamie, I don't think people would really know about Toledo," said a Toledo waitress. Others quoted by the newspaper were puzzled by her interest in Scientology. Farr subsequently wrote a letter to the newspaper declaring "I admire Katie Holmes. She is a wonderful, beautiful actress" and "I do not feel that Katie and I are in any form of competition in the city of Toledo."span

On October 6, 2005, Holmes and Cruise announced they were expecting a child and days later took a walk in a Los Angeles park to show to the world Holmes's very visible pregnancy.span The news was greeted with snark from the media. The Defamer blog wrote "We really jumped the gun when we referred to the initial announcement that [they] were dating as the opening of the seventh seal. Which apocalyptic seal are we up to since then? The ninth? Fourteenth?"span co-star Oliver Hudson said "She almost seems born for motherhood. She's a nurturer. She's got mother qualities a lot of girls her age don't have." span . There has been some questions raised as to what Holmes's legal name is. Several sources give it as "Kate Noelle Holmes", to wit: Janice Dunn. "Katie Holmes: A girl on the verge.” . Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 2000. ISBN 1580631223. 177; John Griffiths. "Katie Holmes: Edging Her Way Into People's Hearts." . Mike Wilkinson and James Drew. "Toledo-area coin dealer counted on GOP ties to bolster business." . May 7, 1998. Living, 41; Rory Evans. "Extra, extra! Batman star Katie Holmes invites us along to savor the sights and sounds of her brand-new town." . Christopher Borrelli. "Katie Holmes for the Holiday: She Left Toledo With a Big Dream and Returns a Big Star." . Christopher Borrelli. "The It Girl: For Toledoan Katie Holmes, Stardom Is Just Around the Corner." . Mangels, 177; Marilyn Johnson and Andrew Southam. "Nice Girls Finish First: So what does it mean that a very nice girl playing a very thoughtful girl has become TV's teen idol? Consider it a good sign." . Ray Richmond. "Youth ache 100 episodes: The WB's signature show, 'Dawson's Creek' brings intellect and frankness to the portrayal of young adults." . Christopher Borrelli. "'Dawson's Creek' Runs Too Smoothly: Characters Have Typical Woes But Adult Vocabularies." . November 29, 1998. A1; Vanessa Winans and David Patch. "Biggest Hit of the Day? Katie Holmes (And Her Mom).” . Roger Ebert. "School of thought: 'Wonder' offers true look at university living and its screwball characters." . June-July 2005. 12-13; Rory Evans. "Extra, extra! Batman star Katie Holmes invites us along to savor the sights and sounds of her brand-new town.". Robert Haskell. "Holmes Sweet Holmes: She's landed the role of a lifetime—beautiful bride of the world's biggest movie star. What's so weird about that?" . June 27, 2005. 52-53; Toby Harnden. "Scientology minder prompts Katie Holmes through first big interview." (London). June 15, 2005. 3; Philip Recchia. "Scientology 'Princess' Is A Spooky Shadow on Kooky Katie." . Nana Schoenberg. "Toledo's biggest star? Sure, Katie Holmes 'is very nice.' But 'she's no Jamie Farr.'" . Ryan E. Smith. "Baby frenzy begins: Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise are expecting their first child together." Christopher Borrelli. "'Dawson's Creek' Runs Too Smoothly: Characters Have Typical Woes But Adult Vocabularies." Christopher Borrelli. "Katie Holmes for the Holiday: She Left Toledo With a Big Dream and Returns a Big Star." Roger Ebert. "School of thought: 'Wonder' offers true look at university living and its screwball characters." Rory Evans. "Extra, extra! Batman star Katie Holmes invites us along to savor the sights and sounds of her brand-new town." Robert Haskell. "Holmes Sweet Holmes: She's landed the role of a lifetime—beautiful bride of the world's biggest movie star. What's so weird about that?" Marilyn Johnson and Andrew Southam. "Nice Girls Finish First: So what does it mean that a very nice girl playing a very thoughtful girl has become TV's teen idol? Consider it a good sign." Tahree Lane. "Paris proposal latest plot twist to Holmes-Cruise romance: Toledo native agrees to take on role of wife." Ray Richmond. "Youth ache 100 episodes: The WB's signature show, 'Dawson's Creek' brings intellect and frankness to the portrayal of young adults." Nana Schoenberg. "Toledo's biggest star? Sure, Katie Holmes 'is very nice.' But 'she's no Jamie Farr.'" Ryan E. Smith. "Baby frenzy begins: Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise are expecting their first child together."