Can This Be Love?
凯蒂·赫尔姆斯——诠释爱的真谛
By Gabrielle Donnelly
乐在其中 译
她双眼晶莹剔透，天使般的脸蛋天真无邪、清纯稚气，稚气得差点让人们以为阿汤哥换了口味，开始啃嫩草了。其实再过三年她就三十了，而且出道已十年有余，一直以来都是好莱坞的“乖乖女”，然而正是这位名气不大的乖女孩让“万人迷”阿汤哥拜倒在她石榴裙下。不可不提的是，她事业爱情双丰收确实要归功于教导有方的家人，是他们的爱和支持让她在好莱坞独树一帜。
(Amelia)
It didn’t take long. Around the swimming pools and cocktail 1)lounges of LA, the rumour mill is already in overdrive about Katie and Tom.
They say he’s too old for her. Not really; there’s a 16-year gap, which isn’t all that outrageous and she’s only four years younger than his former love Penelope Cruz. They say he stole her from under the nose of her former fiance, American Pie actor Chris Klein. Again, not so. Katie and Chris got engaged at the end of 2003, rather significantly never set a wedding date and parted in February.
They say that she 2)schemed to trap Tom, that he’s 3)converting her to 4)Scientology, they say... they say... But who is this apple-cheeked American, best known for her role in TV’s teen 5)angst drama Dawson’s Creek, who has landed Hollywood’s prize catch? And how has she succeeded where, quite literally, hundreds of Hollywood hopefuls have failed?
She was born Katherine Noelle Holmes on 18 December, 1978, in Toledo, Ohio. A nice, middle-class girl, she spent a happy childhood as the youngest of Martin and Kathleen Holmes ' five children, attorney and home-maker respectively.
“They always say you can’t choose your family, and yet they’re such an important part of your life,” she 6)enthuses. “I’m very lucky because I was given a great deal of confidence by my family. I was a very quiet child, a real girlie-girl, and I was constantly watching my big brother and sisters, interested in everything that they were doing and excited by all that was going on with them.”
More to the point, she says, from a very young age all her 7)siblings accepted her as an equal. “Three of them are at least ten years older than me, so when I was only ten I was able to go visit them at college, go to college classes and hang out with their friends. It made me feel unafraid of the world and very secure because I felt that nothing was scary. And by the time it came for me to figure out what I wanted to do in life, I wasn’t held back by any anxieties. After all, I’d been hanging out at Harvard since I was ten!”
Although there are no other actors in the family, she says she has wanted to perform since she was a small child. “I don’t know how I decided on it. I just always liked dancing and singing and doing plays, and then I went to a modelling and talent convention in New York when I was 16 and a manager asked me to come to LA the next time they were shooting TV 8)pilots; so I went with my mom when I was 17 and one thing led to another.”
Her first Hollywood role was a small part playing a spoiled rich kid in Ang Lee’s 9)acclaimed 1997 family drama The Ice Storm. Soon after, she sent in an 10)audition tape for a TV series about four angst-ridden teenagers in a small Maine town. The show’s producers liked her tape and called her to Hollywood on a particular day to read for the part—only for Katie to refuse because the date clashed with the opening night of a school play.
“It was exciting to be asked for an audition for a Hollywood role, but it doesn’t mean you’ll get the part,” she cautions. “In the end, my dad sat me down and said, ‘Look, if you don’t go to Hollywood on that day, maybe the producers will wait for you and maybe they won’t; but you can’t leave your friends in the 11)lurch at this point, because you’ll have to face them when you come back, and if you lose your friends, who will you have?” So we didn’t go to Hollywood. And it was the right decision.”
As it turned out, the producers were interested in giving her a second chance. And so began six years on Dawson’s Creek with fellow then unknowns James Van Der Beek and Joshua Jackson. The role led to parts in movies such as Phone Booth, opposite Colin Farrell, and The Singing Detective, where she appeared alongside Robert Downey Jr and Mel Gibson. But this year she is set to burst into fully 12)fledged movie stardom, playing Rachel Dawes, District Attorney and Bruce Wayne’s love interest, when the new Batman movie, Batman Begins, opens in the summer with Christian Bale in the title role.
Quite when and where Katie met 42-year-old Tom is a subject both are being 13)coy about. Her first love was Dawson’s Creek co-star Joshua Jackson, with whom she remains great friends. Then for five years she was involved with Chris Klein, the handsome star of films such as Election and Rollerball, a traditionally minded young man, who reportedly asked her dad’s permission before proposing to Katie at her parents’ house the Christmas before last. The relationship 14)fizzled out earlier this year, and she was then seen out and about with Black Hawk Down 15)heartthrob Josh Hartnett, though she always denied any romance.
“The wonderful thing about falling in love is that your age doesn’t matter,” she says. “When you meet someone you connect with, and you don’t yet have a history with them, there’s a whole element of discovery that is so much fun and so exciting.”
While twice-married Tom is clearly in a different league to her earlier, younger men, the Holmes family are welcoming him whole-heartedly 16)nevertheless. As Katie says: “My parents would be happy for me whoever I was with so long as he made me happy, too. They just want all their children to find love and happiness and be successful.”
It looks like they’re getting their wish.
