Katie Holmes found her wings after she broke free from a stressful relationship.
“You can get consumed by what people think, but suddenly you just decide to do things on your own terms. I feel like I'm finally figuring that out," Katie Holmes told Instyle.
Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise's tale of love and loss seems like a fairy tale where the princess desired the prince right from her teenage days and got married to him. But there is a catch, she later realized that it isn't what she wanted and broke free from the castle to find a better life.
Holmes became a household name after she landed the role of Joey Potter on Dawson's Creek in 1998. In 2005, she fell in love with her childhood crush, the Mission Impossible actor and he felt the same about her. But little did she know that this will not turn out how she dreamt it would, though it would surely change her life.
Talking about her early life as a die-hard fan of Tom Cruise, Holmes' close friend Mary Beth Piel had revealed to Daily Beast, "She knew everything about him. She said, ‘I have had a crush on him since I was 15, and his posters were on the walls of my bedroom.’ She could not stop talking about Tom Cruise. This was way before they got together, but she was certainly ready for him.”
It would not be wrong to say that their relationship had a mystical vibe to it. In 2004, Holmes broke up with her the fiance Chris Klein and announced that Cruise and she were a couple a month after that. Such was her devotion to Cruise that she agreed to get married in a Scientologist ceremony [scientology is a religion that Cruise follows] on November 18, 2006, reports Goalcast.
In an interview with Glamour, she had said, “From an early age I knew that I wanted to be in this business. So I did everything I could to get here, and when I met Tom, I knew in an instant that we were going to be together, that we were going to get married. He does have a very big life. And you know, we just do it. And, as a woman, you make that transition from being single to [being] a partner. I have a teammate, and it’s like, we’re going to make this work.”
In the first year of their marriage, Holmes got pregnant with their daughter Suri and at the same time, rumors about there marriage going through a low phase started seeping out. E!Online reported that Cruise had issues with her doing sexy or nude scenes, he even insisted on being with her on movie sets. Later, her walking out of the sets of Batman Begins posed more questions about their relationship. And the alleged answer was that Cruise was not OK with her doing the film.
And the inevitable day came in August 2012 when the couple filed for divorce after six years of togetherness. After the divorce Holmes moved to NYC with her daughter Suri and started a fresh life away from the shadow of Tom Cruise, the man she once so dearly wanted to marry. After marriage, her life had mostly become about her superstar husband. Therefore, she took time trying to reinvent herself and her career.
“That time was intense. It was a lot of attention, and I had a little child on top of it,” Holmes revealed to Instyle about moving to NYC with Suri after her 2012 divorce from Cruise. "We had some funny moments out and about in public. So many people I didn't know became my friends and helped us out, and that's what I love about the city."
After Cruise, Katie made her return to the film world with a new roster of movies, including The Giver, Woman in Gold and Miss Meadows. Most recently, she starred in the movie Brahms: The Boy II. She owned a fashion line but stopped its operation in 2014. She told E!Online, "I am now concentrating on acting and motherhood, which did not leave the label the time and attention it deserved.” This move of hers was symbolic; she wanted to shed off her old life and step into a new one without any fear or holdbacks.
“I don’t have any fear now, I don’t have a lot of rules for myself, and I don’t take myself that seriously,” Holmes told People in 2014. "I don’t want [her marriage to Tom Cruise] to define me, to be who I am. I don’t want that to be what I’m known as. I was an actor before, an actor during and an actor now."
"I feel ready for new challenges," she said. Let's hope she overcomes them all!
References:
https://www.glamour.com/story/exclusive-katie-holmes-talks
https://www.instyle.com/celebrity/katie-holmes-april-2020-cover
https://www.goalcast.com/2020/02/24/katie-holmes-divorce-tom-cruise/
https://people.com/celebrity/katie-holmes-speaks-out-i-dont-have-any-fear-now/