Katie Holmes

Real name: Holmes, Katherine Noelle

Birthday: 18 December, 1978

Birth city: Toledo, Ohio, USA

Height: 5' 8 (172 cm)

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.

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.

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.

She had another starring role in Pieces of April (2003), a gritty film about a dysfunctional family on Thanksgiving. In Abandon 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 plays the president's daughter in the forthcoming (as of August 2004) 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. The film, directed by Forest Whitaker, is set for a September 24, 2004 release. 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 as of late 2004) engaged to actor Chris Klein. (Source: Wikipedia)

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