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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 teen drama
Dawson's Creek from 1998 to 2003. Her part on the show, only her second
professional role, made Holmes a star. 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, but she has not found the same success in films as she did on
television and admits most of her films have been "bombs".
Days after ending her engagement with actor Chris Klein, Holmes began in early 2005
a highly publicized relationship with actor Tom Cruise, sixteen years her senior.
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 negative, the press speculating that the relationship was a publicity stunt to
promote the couple's films. Many reports commented negatively about the interest of
Holmes, raised Roman Catholic, in Cruise's religion, Scientology. The couple
announced Holmes was pregnant in October 2005; on April 18, 2006, she gave birth to
Suri Cruise. On November 18, 2006, she and Cruise were married in Italy.
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 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."
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, though Holmes said the
film was "just horrible."
Holmes played a disaffected supermarket clerk in Doug Liman's acclaimed ensemble
piece Go (1999).[49]
She had an uncredited cameo with Dawson's Creek co-star Joshua Jackson in Muppets
from Space (1999), which was also filmed in Wilmington.
Kevin Williamson's disaffection for his high school days spawned 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, baring her breasts and her buttocks in a thong 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." Her appearance was lamented by
Variety'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." In Ohio, the scene met with disapproval, Russ Lemmon
writing in The Blade:
“ 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. ”
In Abandon (2002), written by Oscar winner Stephen Gaghan, Holmes was a delusional,
homicidal college student named "Katie." Todd McCarthy of Variety and Roger Ebert
commended her performance, but other critics and audiences savaged it. The actress
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).
Holmes'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."
Holmes played the President's daughter in First Daughter, which was originally to
be released in January 2004 on the same day as Chasing Liberty, the Mandy Moore
film about a president's daughter, but was ultimately released in September 2004 to
dismal reviews and ticket sales. First Daughter, directed by Forest Whitaker, also
starred Michael Keaton as her father and Marc Blucas as her love interest. The
Hollywood Reporter'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." 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. Variety was unenthusiastic. "Holmes is OK", was its critic's sole remark
on her performance.
She received a Golden Raspberry nomination for "worst supporting actress" for the
film.
In 2005, she appeared in the film version of Christopher Buckley's satirical novel
Thank You for Smoking about a tobacco lobbyist played by Aaron Eckhart, whom
Holmes's character, a Washington reporter, seduces. Variety 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" and The New York Times said the cast was
"exceptionally fine" except for Holmes, who "strain[ed] credulity" in her role.
Holmes 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 Holmes dropped out because of her
pregnancy.
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. Italian authorities said the ceremony was not legal since no paperwork had
been filed. Bracciano's mayor, Patrizia Riccioni, told the British newspaper the
Sunday Mirror that "No civil ceremony has taken place and no paperwork has been
received. The wedding is not legally-binding." 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.
In March of 2007, it was reported that Holmes had called friend Victoria Beckham to
discuss troubles in her relationship with Cruise, and that she may have had to
undergo retraining in Scientology techniques. According to one source close to
Katie, Tom has told her that she needs to undergo "mommy classes", taught by
Scientologists.
Source : Some of the information on
this page came from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU
Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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