How Katie Holmes Completely Reinvented Her Life

In early 2005, Katie Holmes' life was going in a certain direction.

She was playing the love of Bruce Wayne's life in Batman Begins, the first film in Christopher Nolan's hotly anticipated trilogy about the Caped Crusader, due out that June. And Thank You for Smoking, in which she played a manipulative reporter who has an affair with a tobacco lobbyist, would have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival that September.

So Holmes' year definitely began with certain hopes, dreams and expectations. Just two years removed from ending up with Pacey on Dawson's Creek, the 26-year-old actress had already put her Joey Potter days firmly behind her.

Then she met Tom Cruise.

But it wasn't just the unbelievable story of a young star who as a kid had once tacked his picture to her bedroom wall getting to be his girlfriend in real life (and in short succession his fiancée, mother of his child and wife) that piqued the world's fancy. It was how the world found out about it.

"You're gone," Oprah Winfrey told Cruise as he giddily declared himself down for the count and punctuated his love for Katie with a hop onto Oprah's couch—and into pop culture history—in May 2005.

As his former wife remembers: "He basically swept me off my feet. I fell madly, passionately in love. And as happens when you fall in love, my whole plan in terms of what I wanted for my life—I was like, 'Forget it. This is it.' I was consumed by it, willingly."





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