Katie was born in Toledo, Ohio on December 18, 1978, the youngest in a family of five children (four daughters, one son) of Kathleen A. Stothers, a homemaker and a philanthropist, and Martin Joseph Holmes, Sr. (born 1945), an attorney specializing in family law.

She lived in the Corey Woods section of Sylvania Township in a brick 1862 Italianate-style home. Her siblings are Tamera, Holly Ann, Martin Joseph, Jr, who is also an attorney, and Nancy Kay, a teacher.

Katie, raised 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. 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). Katie loves 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, and got straight A grades. 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.”

In January 1997, Katie 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. 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. “I was doing my school play, Damn Yankees. 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 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.’”

The producers permitted her to audition on videotape. Katie read for the part of Joey Potter, the tomboy best friend of the title character Dawson, on a videotape shot in her basement, her mother reading Dawson’s lines. The Hollywood Reporter 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.” 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!” 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.” Williamson thought she had exactly the right look for Joey Potter. “She had those eyes, those eyes just stained with loneliness.”

In 2005, Katie 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 Phone Booth, in which she played a supporting role. She lamented “It’s not like I have a lot of stuff that’s great just waiting for me to sign on to.” Of course, in recent years, that has changed dramatically.

Her first leading role came in Disturbing Behavior (1998), 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.” The actress won a MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance for the role.

Katie played a disaffected supermarket clerk in Doug Liman’s acclaimed ensemble piece Go (1999). She had an uncredited cameo with Dawson’s Creek co-star Joshua Jackson in Muppets from Space (1999), which was also filmed in Wilmington. In Kevin Williamson’s Teaching Mrs. Tingle (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. In Wonder Boys (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 student who lusts after Professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), her creative writing instructor and landlord. Kenneth Turan of The Los Angeles Times said she was “just right as the beauty with kind of a crush on the old man.”

In The Gift (2000), a Southern Gothic story directed by Sam Raimi and starring Cate Blanchett, she played the antithesis of Joey Potter: a promiscuous rich girl having affairs with everyone from a sociopathic wife-beater (Keanu Reeves) to the district attorney (Gary Cole), and is murdered by her fiancé (Greg Kinnear). Holmes did her first nude scene for the film, in a scene where her character was about to be murdered. The scene was originally written with her character completely nude, but a nervous Katie opted to wear panties the day before the shoot. Of the scene, she said, “I just hope there aren’t a lot of pauses on DVD players.”

In Abandon (2002), written by Oscar winner Stephen Gaghan, Katie was a delusional, homicidal college student named “Katie.” Todd McCarthy of Variety and Roger Ebert commended her performance.
Katie played the mistress of the public relations flack played by Colin Farrell in Phone Booth (2002) and Robert Downey, Jr.’s nurse in The Singing Detective (2003).

Katie’s next starring role was in Pieces of April (2003), a gritty comedy about a dysfunctional family on Thanksgiving. Variety said it was “one of her best film performances.” “Each actor shines”, wrote Elvis Mitchell, “even Ms. Holmes, whose beauty seems to have fogged the minds of her previous directors” in playing “a brat who is slaving to find her inner decency and barely has the equipment for such an achievement, let alone to serve a meal whose salmonella potential could claim an entire borough. Yet it is her surliness, as well as her intransigent determination to make Thanksgiving work, that keeps the laughs coming.”

Katie played the President’s daughter in First Daughter, which opened in September, 2004. First Daughter, directed by Forest Whitaker, also starred Michael Keaton as her father and Marc Blucas as her love interest.

In the 2005 film Batman Begins, the most successful film of her career to date, she played Rachel Dawes, an attorney in the Gotham City district attorney’s office and the childhood sweetheart of the title character.

In 2005, she also appeared in the film version of Christopher Buckley’s satirical novel Thank You for Smoking about a tobacco lobbyist played by Aaron Eckhart, whom Katie’s character, a Washington reporter, seduces.

After speculation about her reprising her role in The Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins, it was finally confirmed by her agent that she would not appear because she did not want to spend too much time away from her family. Her role was later recast with Maggie Gyllenhaal in her place. Instead, she decided to star in the comedy Mad Money, opposite Diane Keaton and Queen Latifah. Katie had agreed to play in Shame on You, a biopic about the country singer Spade Cooley written and directed by Dennis Quaid, as the wife whom Cooley (played by Quaid) stomps to death. But the picture, set to shoot in New Orleans, Louisiana, was delayed by Hurricane Katrina, and Katie dropped out because of her pregnancy.

Katie made her Broadway debut in the revival of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons in September 2008 to excellent reviews and sold out performances nightly. Holmes had always dreamed of being on Broadway and the role was a dream come true for her. She played her part flawlessly and never missed a performance.

PERSONAL LIFE

Katie 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 met and began a relationship with Tom Cruise.

Katie dated her Dawson’s Creek co-star Joshua Jackson for all the first season and part of the second season, the relationship ending amicably. 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.”

Katie met actor Chris Klein in 2000. A Midwesterner like Katie—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.” Katie told a reporter in 2005, “Chris and I care about each other and we’re still friends.”

Weeks after her relationship with Chris Klein ended, Katie began dating actor Tom Cruise whom she met during a business meeting. Their first public appearance together was on April 29, 2005, in Rome, Italy, at the David di Donatello Awards, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars.

Her family expressed support, with her father stating, “We’re very excited for Katie”, and saying 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”. Katie’s sister Tamara said, “They’re both wonderful people.”

Tom proposed to Katie in the early morning of June 18, 2005, atop Paris’s Eiffel Tower and she happily accepted his proposal.

At the press conference, attended by Katie’s mother, Tom announced the news, declaring, “Today is a magnificent day for me. I’m engaged to a magnificent woman.”

On April 18, 2006, Katie gave birth to a healthy, happy baby girl she and Tom named Suri. The name Suri “is a word with origins in both Hebrew and Persian. In Hebrew, it means ‘princess’ and in Persian, ‘red rose.” Tom and Katie announced.

On November 18, 2006, Holmes and Cruise were married at the 15th-century Odescalchi Castle in Bracciano, Italy, in a ceremony attended by many Hollywood stars. The actors’ had officialized their marriage in Los Angeles prior to their trip to Italy for the Scientology ceremony and reception. The day after the ceremony, the couple left for a honeymoon in the Maldives, taking their daughter Suri with them.

Suri arrived exactly one year to the day after Cruise and Holmes met on April 18, 2005. Until September 2006, Suri had not been seen in public to maintain the family’s privacy while they enjoyed their new daughter.

The first photographs of Suri appeared in the October 2006 issue of Vanity Fair, shot by Annie Leibovitz to great fanfare and huge sales. In the accompanying story, Katie 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.”

Katie currently resides in Los Angeles with her husband Tom, daughter Suri, and stepchildren Bella and Conor. She continues to field offers for films, television and the stage and completed the film “Extra Man” in February, 2009.

Aside from her career, Katie enjoys being with her husband, daughter and stepchildren, designing clothing for children with her partner, Jeanne Yang, and being with her extended family.

Thanks to Kat and Angela at TomCruiseForever