Katie Holmes to Debut on Broadway
Tom Cruise's Wife Set to Act in WWII Drama "All My Sons"
Holmes will make her introduction on Broadway in a revival of the Arthur Miller classic.
Katie Holmes is best known for her role as Joey Potter on the hit WB network show Dawson’s Creek and being Mrs. Tom Cruise. But later this year, Holmes will break into a new role; Broadway actress.
Katie Holmes' Background
Holmes grew up in Toledo, Ohio and caught the acting bug when performing in high school musicals. She got her first major role in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm before hitting it big as Joey Potter on Dawson’s Creek. She became a star as the loveably neurotic small-town girl with a large vocabulary who would always carry a torch for childhood friend Dawson Leery.
Holmes flexed her acting chops during breaks from Dawson’s Creek with different movies roles. These movies include Go, Teaching Mrs. Tingle, Disturbing Behavior and a small role in the Colin Farrell movie Phone Booth. Holmes showed her acting depth with characters that were extremely different from the small-town Joey Potter audiences were used to seeing.
Dawson’s Creek ended a six-season run in 2003 but Holmes continued to dip her toes into the movie pool with Pieces of April and First Daughter. These movies weren’t huge box office hits and Holmes started to slip out of the spotlight. However, in 2005, anticipation was growing with Batman Begins, the newest installment of the Batman series, in which Holmes played a love interest. Holmes was also drawing attention for her role in Thank You for Smoking, a satire looking at how tobacco companies spin their product. The buzz was growing for Holmes and the outlook on her career in major blockbusters looked good.
Marriage Interrupts Holmes' Career
Enter Tom Cruise. He and Holmes started dating in April 2005 and their entire relationship became a media whirlwind. The couple showed up at Cruise’s movie premiers, media junkets and all over the world on red carpets. They were seen kissing and canoodling whenever and whereever possible. Holmes was starting to reach A-list celebrity status and pictures of her were splashed across every magazine simply because she was dating Cruise. Before fans got time to stomach this newfound celebrity status, Holmes was engaged, pregnant and putting acting on the back burner.
The paparazzi mayhem around the new couple was relentless throughout Holmes’s entire pregnancy and into the birth of daughter Suri. Fans started to voice concerns after Holmes didn’t really promote her new movies and magazine articles started coming out regarding rumors Cruise had to "ok" her movie roles before she took them. Holmes didn’t have another movie come out until 2008’s Mad Money which wasn’t the box office success viewers were hoping for.
New Acting Life
A key role on Broadway is the ability to sing. Holmes isn’t an actor-turned-singer like other people in Hollywood but she has been known to carry a tune. Her character on Dawson’s Creek would sing periodically at a bar her group of friend’s frequented and fans realized Holmes had a pretty good voice.
Rumors started leaking out in early May 2008 that Holmes was in talks to play a role in a stage revival of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons set in post WWII. The productions producer, Eric Falkenstein told OK!, “Katie is very well suited for the role of Ann.” He goes on to praise Holmes by saying, "there is an additional layer of soul to Ann and from the work I’ve seen of Katie, she has always impressed with multi-faceted characters.
Reactions, via celebrity gossip sites, are mixed on Holmes’s new role. Some fans are eager for her to get back in the spotlight and dust off her acting chops while others see it as Cruise pulling strings to get his wife into roles he “agrees with”.
