Childhood

Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, Katie Holmes was a student at the all-girls Catholic school Notre Dame Academy in Ohio from which she graduated in 1997.

Born two months premature, her parents, Martin and Kathleen, say that her strong-willed personality is probably from being born premature.  

The youngest of five children, she has three older sisters and an older brother. Katie had no intention of becoming an actress while growing up in Toledo.

Katie’s mother decided that it would be advantageous to let her ambitious daughter enroll at a local modeling and talent school, where she could boost her artistic education and also learn proper manners and sophistication.

She began to model and signed up with Margaret O'Brien's Modeling School in Toledo.

At age 16, she competed at the International Modeling and Talent Association and took home many awards. Despite her promising modeling career, Katie opted for acting as her full time job. She felt modeling was not enough of a challenge.

So when she was 17, Katie moved to Los Angeles with her mother to try her luck at acting.

Katie was a bright student and was admitted to the Columbia University in 1997. After delaying enrollment due to an acting schedule conflict, Katie later attended the university in the summer of 2000, studying photography

Career

She is considered among the most talented actresses of her generation, and she has survived past her teen sitcom years.

She competed in the International Modeling and Talent Association by singing, dancing, and reciting a monologue from To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). By the end of that time in New York, Katie won many awards.

Luck was definitely on her side, since Katie's feature film debut took no more than one audition. Inexperienced and tinged with a drop of naïveté, she was cast in 1997's The Ice Storm, as Tobey Maguire's girlfriend.

1998 was probably Katie's breakout year. TV series creator Kevin Williamson was impressed by her video auditions and handed her the role of Josephine "Joey" Potter in his teen soap, WB's Dawson's Creek (A drama about young people and their lives in a small coastal town).

Based on the success of Dawson's Creek and its popularity among teens, Katie was cast in the thriller Disturbing Behavior in 1998 which earned her an MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance. She followed it up with more significant roles in the next year's movies. In 1999 Katie played supermarket checkout clerk Claire in Doug Liman's comedy Go (opposite Sarah Polley) and became Helen Mirren's desperate student, Leigh Ann Watson, in Kevin Williamson's directional debut, the thriller comedy Teaching Mrs. Tingle.

In 2000, while still roaming the halls of high school in Dawson's Creek, Katie appeared in Wonder Boys, starring Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire.

She was also noted performing her first nude scene in Sam Raimi's Southern Gothic story The Gift, in which she was cast as enticing rich girl Jessica King.

Commenting on her nude scene in the film, Katie said, "I just hope there aren't a lot of pauses on DVD players."

After hosting Saturday Night Live in February of 2001, Katie became Colin Farrell's mistress, Pamela McFadden, in Joel Schumacher's thriller Phone Booth (2002, also starring Kiefer Sutherland).

Her first leading role also came in the same year with Abandon (2002). She played a college student named Katie Burke, who is haunted by the mysterious disappearance of her boyfriend who vanished two years prior.

Katie then appeared in a string of moderately successful movies, including The Singing Detective (2003), and Pieces of April (2003).