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, Holmes began a highly publicized relationship with actor Tom Cruise, which drew attention due to the 16-year age difference between the two. 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. On April 18, 2006, Holmes gave birth to their daughter, Suri. On November 18, 2006, she and Cruise were married in Italy.
Early life:
Holmes was born in Toledo, Ohio, the youngest in a family of five children (four daughters, one son) of 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. Her siblings are Tamera (born c. 1968), Holly Ann (born 1969), Martin Joseph, Jr. (born 1970), who works as a lawyer in Ohio, and Nancy Kay (Blaylock), a teacher (born c. 1975).
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 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. Holmes loved reading: "I never feel lonely in a bookstore", she said. 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." Holmes told her hometown paper The Blade that the three words best describing herself were "honest, determined, and imaginative."
At age fourteen 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."
Personal life:
Holmes purchased a townhouse in Wilmington in 2002. When Dawson's Creek ended its run in 2003, she moved to Los Angeles, California, then New York City in 2005, before going back to Los Angeles when she married Tom Cruise. Holmes dated her Dawson's Creek co-star Joshua Jackson for all the first season and part of the second season, the relationship ending peacefully. She told Rolling Stone, "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." 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. In the fall of 2005, Klein said of the split, "We grew up. The fantasy was over and reality set in." Holmes told a reporter in 2005, "Chris and I care about each other and we're still friends."
In July 2009, Holmes, Nigel Lythgoe, Adam Shankman, and Carrie Ann Inaba announced the launch of a dance scholarship fund called the Dizzy Feet Foundation.
Relationship with Tom Cruise:
Weeks after her relationship with
On May 23, 2005, Cruise appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, jumping on Winfrey's couch and vociferously declaring his love for Holmes. He went backstage and pulled the embarrassed actress onto the program. Cruise proposed to Holmes in the early morning of June 17, 2005, atop Paris's Eiffel Tower; she accepted. At the press conference, attended by Holmes's mother, Cruise announced the news, declaring, "Today is a magnificent day for me. I'm engaged to a magnificent woman."
Back in Toledo, the news was greeted with skepticism. 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.'" Asked in an interview how she felt about reports that friends in Toledo are worried about her, Holmes replied, "People who say that aren't my friends." Following the engagement, the Chicago Tribune 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 M*A*S*H. "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."
On November 18, 2006, Holmes and Cruise were married at the 15th-century Odescalchi Castle in Bracciano, Italy, in a Scientology ceremony attended by many Hollywood stars. The actors' publicist said the couple had "officialized" their marriage in Los Angeles the day before the Italian ceremony. The day after the ceremony, the couple left for a honeymoon in the Maldives.
Scientology:
Holmes, who was raised a
Suri Cruise:
On April 18, 2006, Holmes gave birth to a baby girl named Suri. A Vanity Fair article reported that Suri arrived exactly one year after Cruise and Holmes met, April 18, 2005. The Los Angeles Times summarized the written statement Cruise released on the birth, saying the name "is a word with origins in both Hebrew and Persian. In Hebrew, it means 'princess' and in Persian, 'red rose,' it was claimed in the release." Although some Hebrew linguists had never seen the word for "princess" spelled this way and its meaning, others said it was a Yiddish, not Hebrew, derivation of "Sarah".
Until September 2006, Suri had not been seen in public, which led to tabloid stories questioning the existence of the child, contrasting Holmes and Cruise to other celebrity couples with newborns such as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Typical was the US Weekly cover story "BABY MYSTERY: Best friends' visits denied, baby photos cancelled, a wedding delayed, and Katie in seclusion."
The first photographs of the child appeared in the October 2006 issue of Vanity Fair, shot by Annie Leibovitz. In the accompanying story, Holmes said "we weren't trying to hide anything" and said she was bothered by the press coverage. "I do know what is being said in the press. This is my future. This is my family and I care so much about them. The stories are not okay. It eats away at me because it's just not okay." This issue of Vanity Fair became the publication's second best selling issue of all time, selling more than 700,000 copies.
In an April 2006 interview with ABC News's Diane Sawyer, Cruise said he and Holmes were "just Scientologists" and that Suri would not be baptized Catholic.
