An attractive and capable actress whose talent has been overshadowed by her tabloid-friendly love life, Holmes landed a supporting part in 1997's The Ice Storm on her first-ever audition. On her second, she snagged a role on the prime-time teen soap Dawson's Creek. Afraid of being typecast, Holmes took on diverse film roles when the series was on hiatus, including a checkout girl involved in a drug deal in 1999's Go, a promiscuous murder victim in The Gift and a wannabe teen seductress in Wonder Boys, both in 2000. When Dawson's Creek ended in 2003, Holmes gave a stunning performance as a punky slacker attempting to prepare Thanksgiving dinner in the low-budget indie hit Pieces of April. But focus soon shifted from her career to her stormy personal life. After splitting from longtime love Chris Klein, she took up with Tom Cruise in the spring of 2005, prompting the megastar to proclaim his love standing atop a sofa on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Dubbed TomKat by the media, the couple enjoyed a whirlwind courtship and soon announced that they were engaged and pregnant. Yet cynics complained that the romance was a publicity stunt to generate interest in Holmes' first blockbuster, Batman Begins, and Cruise's War of the Worlds.