As dusk falls over the carpet of lights spread out below her windows, Katherine Heigl stands in the doorway of her house in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, smoking a cigarette and contemplating the spectacular view she’s about to give up. With her 29th birthday approaching, she’s selling one house, buying another, getting ready to move, planning a wedding, launching a production company, and developing property in Utah, all while continuing to shoot one of television’s most popular shows.
Then there’s the sudden-fame part. When Knocked Up became last summer’s big romantic comedy, Heigl was transformed into Hollywood’s new “It girl.” In September, she astonished everyone, including herself and her own mother, by winning the Emmy Award as outstanding supporting actress in a drama series for her portrayal of Isobel “Izzie” Stevens, on Grey’s Anatomy. During her brief hiatus from the show, Heigl was busy making her next movie, 27 Dresses, which hits theaters this month.
“It’s her year,” says Kate Walsh, star of the Grey’s Anatomy spin-off series, Private Practice.
But the latest overnight sensation is actually an industry veteran. “Everything I have worked my ass off for all my life, it was just like—bam! It wasn’t a slow progression,” Heigl says.
Indeed, it’s unwise to be misled by the dewy peaches-and-cream look; Heigl’s fresh-faced blond beauty conceals a gimlet-eyed pragmatism that was earned the old-fashioned way, by paying dues. “She’s been acting since she was a kid, so as young as she is, she’s kind of an old pro,” Walsh observes.
Unlike many seasoned pros, however, Heigl is startlingly candid. As far as opinions go, if Heigl thinks it, she says it—no matter what the consequences. The most notorious example occurred a year ago, when she publicly denounced fellow Grey’s Anatomy cast member Isaiah Washington over a controversy in which Washington called co-star T. R. Knight a “faggot.”
“It’s rare to find that kind of honesty in someone, whatever the cost,” Knight says now. “A lot of us care way too much what people think, but it’s refreshing to have someone who speaks the kind of truth where your mouth just drops. To her, being up-front and straight with people is paramount. There’s a real freedom to that that I’m still working on, but she’s already got it. It’s intrinsically who she is.”
So much so that it can actually get in her way. Izzie was initially a sympathetic character who lost the man she loved to heart disease and funded a free clinic with the money he left her, but she has recently moved on from noble suffering to an adulterous relationship with Knight’s character, her married best friend, George, much to the distress of his wife. Another actress might be thrilled just to occupy the spotlight, but Heigl is more concerned about understanding Izzie’s seemingly uncharacteristic actions.
“That was kind of a big change for Izzie, wasn’t it, after she was so up on her moral high ground,” she says, her tone tinged with acid. “They really hurt somebody, and they didn’t seem to be taking a lot of responsibility for it. I have a really hard time with that kind of thing. I’m maybe a little too black-and-white about it. I don’t really know Izzie very well right now. She’s changed a lot. I’m trying to figure her out and keep her real.”
But Heigl is well aware of the commercial considerations that often drive such decisions. “It was a ratings ploy,” she says. “It was absolutely something that shocked people; it wasn’t predictable, and people didn’t see it coming. It’s our fourth season; there’s not a lot of spontaneity left. And business is business; I understand that, but I want there to be some cooperation between the business end and the creative end, so there’s some way of keeping it real.”
Heigl is equally forthright about the movie that catapulted her onto the A-list. Many critics raved about Knocked Up, but quite a few discerned an underlying misogyny that made female characters into unappealing caricatures while romanticizing immature and irresponsible male behavior. Heigl counts herself among those who were perturbed.
“It was a little sexist,” she says. “It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it, on some days. I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women? Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie.”
Judd Apatow, the writer and director of Knocked Up, is philosophical about such reactions. “I think, for all of us, making this movie was like when you get drunk and spurt out your deepest feelings and then the next day you have drunk remorse about what you said. We all feel very proud and a little embarrassed about what we’ve revealed about ourselves,” he says. “The movie is not meant to be romantic, it’s meant to be honest. Katie could not have been better, because she went there.”
In any case, Heigl is a realist about the entertainment industry, not to mention the nature of celebrity. She now has the clout to start her own production company. Lest anyone suspect that her head was turned by the exhilarating successes of the past year, however, she called her fledgling venture Abishag Productions.
How many hot twentysomething movie stars would be shrewd enough, well read enough, and cynical enough to name their new business after a character in a caustic Robert Frost poem about the transience of beauty and fame?
Heigl recites, drawing on her cigarette.
She flashes me a mordant smile. “I just thought it would help to keep perspective,” she says.
The poem, “Provide, Provide,” gets even more brutal:
Nancy Heigl, Katherine’s mother and longtime business partner,
helps her keep such realities firmly in mind. “This is a young woman’s career, and the reality is that by 40 or 45 it will be a different career,” she says. “There will be many young women coming up, and as an actress, you really don’t have that much control. Katie has wanted for years to get into production.”
Although that opportunity has now materialized, colleagues doubt that Heigl is likely to fall anytime soon. “She is a superstar, without question,” says Anne Fletcher, the director of 27 Dresses. “She has the ‘It’ factor. You can’t buy it; you can’t learn it; you can’t create it; it just is. We haven’t had one of her in many years. Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Meg Ryan—those have been our go-to girls for romantic comedy for a very long time, but we haven’t had a new one. Katie has beauty, vulnerability, identifiability. She’s funny, charming, lovely to watch. Her slightest eye movement is captivating; you know instantly what’s going on. The screen eats her up. She’s a brilliant comic actor and an unbelievable dramatic actor as well, and she’s going to have whatever she wants.”
Right now, what Heigl wants is cheese, and she’s already devoured quite a bit of the spread she’s placed on the coffee table for us, but she’s trying to restrain herself from eating more. “Cheese is so great,” she murmurs, eyeing the serving plate like a hungry animal. “But I guess I should stop, shouldn’t I … ”
Let other actresses live on coffee and coke; Heigl takes some more cheese and then swigs from her glass of white wine. Although she grew up in a family of Mormon converts, she is standing in her doorway because she doesn’t want the smoke from her cigarette inside the house. So much for the teetotaling, nonsmoking Mormons; Heigl has long been someone who knows how to go after what she wants, even if it’s prohibited by her religion—or loaded with calories.
She may be the latest darling of the red carpet, but Heigl hasn’t made any attempt at glamour tonight; she’s wearing a tank top and baggy pants, her flaxen hair is yanked back in a bun, and her face has been scrubbed clean of makeup. In 27 Dresses, the prototypical luscious blonde has even been given mousy brownish hair, which is Hollywood’s way of signaling that no one is supposed to notice she’s gorgeous until the end of the movie.
That’s hardly the only departure from reality. Heigl plays a typically passive, put-upon chick-flick heroine who not only is the girl who doesn’t get the guy, but is also maddeningly incapable of speaking up for herself, no matter how egregious the provocation. Having served as the bridesmaid for 27 friends, plain Jane must then stand aside while her self-centered younger sister swoops in and seduces the man that Jane has worshipped for years.
But in her own life Heigl is an assertive, impatient go-getter who quickly tired of waiting for her boyfriend to propose and demanded to know what his intentions were. She even went and picked out the diamond for her ring.
In her romantic life, at least, such actions were uncharacteristic. “I’m not really a first-move kind of gal,” she says. “I’m one of those women who always thinks it’s better to play it cool and keep them wanting more, but I really threw myself at him. I broke all the rules.”
Heigl met singer-songwriter Josh Kelley when she was cast in the music video of his 2005 single “Only You.” “He was funny and charming, and we ended up having dinner that night,” she says. “I had never dated a musician, and he was really sexy to me. His manager was playing Cupid; he said, ‘You’ve got to come up to his room and hear this really sexy song!’ Then his manager made some excuse and left. Josh was really smooth. He asked me what my favorite flower was, my favorite fruit, even my favorite cut of steak. It must have been a line he used before, but I was intrigued.”
The next day, she waited a few hours, but got fed up when he hadn’t called by midafternoon. “I said, Screw it, I’ll call him. I was really interested,” she says. “He played it very cool for about five weeks. I had never dated a guy I was so unsure of. I thought maybe I liked him more than he liked me, and I didn’t like that much at all. He played it so cool; he was such a bastard!” She grins. “It totally worked.”
Once again she got tired of waiting and decided to force the issue: “I said I loved him first, and wanted to know how he felt. Thankfully, we were on the same page, or it would have been pretty embarrassing.”
But Heigl had arrived at a crucial turning point in her life. “As women, we have more of a tendency to be people-pleasers, and I know a lot of women who are not vocal about what makes them happy,” she says. “I was like that in my early 20s, but not anymore. I spent a lot of time not being clear about who I was and what was important to me. It’s easy to be taken advantage of if you’re not honest. I knew that dance of trying to please a man, trying to guess what they want you to be, and I got really tired of that, really confused and frustrated. I decided I was sick of trying to figure out what everybody else wanted, and I should just decide what I want, and be honest, and not spend all my time guessing. Josh is the first serious relationship I’ve ever had where I was like, This is me. From the moment I met him, I said, This is what I want and what I need.”
As for marriage, “I broached that too,” she says. “About nine months after we started dating, I started talking about marriage. I said, ‘Where are you at? How do you feel?’”
Although Kelley admitted he was also thinking about it, he took his own sweet time to act. “I had to sit tight for about three months, till he proposed, which was annoying,” Heigl says. “I was like, ‘When? When?’ He was like, ‘You’ll see. You’ll see!’”
She makes a face. “I’m terrible with patience. I wanted to be a fiancée; I wanted to call him my fiancé and have everyone know it. It’s been really hard for me to define for myself why it’s important to me. I think what it came down to was tradition—honoring our parents, honoring their history, taking it seriously. I also didn’t want to live together before we were married. I still have enough Mormon in me—not a lot, but enough—that I wanted to keep that a little bit sacred.”
But Heigl, whose parents divorced when she was in her early 20s, is trying to be realistic about this as well. “I don’t have any grand illusions about marriage,” she says. “I think it’s a crapshoot. The odds are really bad, especially in this town. But I have a lot of faith in Josh, and I wanted to have that one day when I stand in front of my friends and my family and honor him and how important he is in my life. My career is really important to me, but there have to be other great, important things in your life besides work.”
For many years, however, work was Heigl’s salvation. She grew up in the wealthy suburb of New Canaan, Connecticut, with two brothers, an adopted Korean sister, a father who was a financial planner, and a stay-at-home mother. When Katherine was 7, she and her older sister were out shopping with their mom when her 15-year-old brother was fatally injured in an accident. “He made a really terrible decision to sit in the back of a pickup truck; a young girl was driving, it was raining, and she hit a patch of road that was slippery with wet leaves,” Heigl says. “The car spun and hit a bank and then rolled. Jason got caught in the spin. The accident happened 40 feet from our front door. We got home from Lord & Taylor and a friend called my mother and said, ‘Oh, Nancy, I’m so sorry!’ That’s how we found out. He was in the hospital a week, but he was brain-dead.”
Although Katherine’s mother was Lutheran and her father was Catholic, the tragedy led them to convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. “A couple of Mormon families were a great comfort,” Heigl explains. “Both my parents felt a great desire for answers, and they found an answer in the Mormon church—or answers they could live with, anyway, because there really are none. I didn’t really understand death, so it was very confusing for me. The worst part was watching the devastation of my family. They weren’t the same people anymore. Everything was kind of a mess for a while. It wasn’t like Ordinary People, where it destroyed that family so badly that there was never finding any joy or loving or appreciating being alive again. But I give my parents unbelievable credit for pulling it together, and I give the Mormon church a lot of credit for helping them to do that.”
A year and a half after Jason died, Katherine’s aunt took some pictures of her and sent them to Wilhelmina and Ford, thereby launching her career. “Modeling sounded exciting and glamorous, and I really wanted to do it,” Heigl says. “I think my mother let me because it was something to distract her, a way for her to get out of the house. Because of her devastation and heartbreak, I think she was too tired to fight me on it. She said, ‘O.K., we’ll try it.’”
According to her mother, Katherine had always reveled in the spotlight. “She loved attention, and she was the fourth child, so she wasn’t getting a lot of that,” says Nancy Heigl. But Katherine did get a lot of work. “I started getting print ads, and then commercials, and by the time I was 11 I did my first film,” she reports. “I decided then that I only wanted to act, and I did movies until I graduated from high school. Acting and modeling were like a hobby, kind of like my after-school sport. I was never really good at the things that New Canaan people do, like field hockey and cheerleading, but I had something of my own that I was good at: I worked.”
Her co-workers say that Heigl’s experience has produced a relaxed style that belies the craft involved. “She definitely made it seem effortless,” says Malin Akerman, who played Heigl’s sister in 27 Dresses. “She’s so comfortable on a set, she knows what she wants, and she just slips into character so easily; we would be joking up until they called ‘Action!’ The way she acts is so natural, and I think that’s why she’s so watchable.”
Throughout Heigl’s teens, work continued to provide a refuge from difficult personal challenges. When Katherine was 17, her parents separated—whereupon her mother learned she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy as well as nine months of chemotherapy. “It was drama after drama after drama,” says Katherine, who took turns with her sister, Meg, in accompanying their mother to every chemo session.
But Katherine says the divorce itself “was no big deal at all; that was a no-brainer. We were like, Yeah—it’s about time! We saw this coming for years. My parents are really good people; they just weren’t great together.”
When Katherine graduated from high school, she and her mother moved to Los Angeles, where they lived together until Katherine was 22. Her mother remains her business partner.
“She manages everything—finances, agents, lawyers, publicists, contacts with studios, producers, all of it,” says Katherine. “My mother is a great source of advice and wisdom and consolation for me. I kind of just want to do my job, and I need someone I can trust to handle all the rest of it. This is a woman who was a homemaker, making Martha Stewart recipes, but she learned fast. She didn’t care if she made any friends in this town. Her job was to protect me and to be very fierce in defending me. I always have one person saying, ‘If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to do it.’ With other people, your agenda is never the most important agenda. My mother was the only one who thought what I wanted was important. She is really smart and really savvy, and she refuses to make choices based on fear. This is a fear-dominated industry; it’s about rise and fall, and my mother refuses to be intimidated by that. This is all a game of chicken, and my mother is really good at chicken.”
When Heigl won her Emmy last September, she dedicated it to her mom, who attended the ceremony with her. “This is for you; this is because of you,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to be here without you.”
Nancy Heigl was not surprised by her daughter’s success. “I always did think this was going to happen; I just didn’t know when,” she says. “I’m just so thrilled for her, and I’m hugely grateful.”
Because their relationship is so close, however, Katherine was apprehensive about how Josh would adjust to it. “I talk to my mother every day, and I’ve always felt the need to defend or excuse my relationship with my mother,” she says. “The men in my life can feel, I should be more important in your life than your mother. A lot of men would have problems with that relationship, but Josh is unbelievably mature. He’s really wise and really grounded. He was the first man in my life I could go to with a problem and feel confident that he would help me find a solution. For my mother, Josh is a relief, because at the end of the day, any good parent wants you to be happy, and Josh makes me happy. I laugh a lot more. I’m not as stressed out. My burden is lightened.”
Although her family is clearly an enormous source of support, Katherine’s responsibilities nonetheless include the livelihoods of not only her mother but her older brother, who is now supervising the house she is building in Utah. “I hope she’s never felt responsible for me, but she probably has,” Nancy Heigl says. “Right from the beginning, I told her, ‘It’s more important to me who you are as a person than whether you succeed, so I’m your mother first and your partner second.’”
These days there’s success—and the new stresses that accompany it. “I am thrilled and grateful and excited; it’s all amazingly wonderful,” Heigl says. “But you feel like you have to meet expectations now, and there’s a lot of pressure in making the choices. It’s been a crazy year—just a lot of decisions to make every day, business-related, house-related, wedding-related. There never seems to be a minute, and that freaks me out.”
But the respect that attends success is a great relief. “I’m still working hard, but it doesn’t feel like I’m banging my head against the wall anymore,” she says. “There were a lot of years of trying to get people to hire me. I was auditioning for everything, just to pay the bills, and I wasn’t doing work I wanted to do. It was disheartening. But power in this town comes with box office. When heads of studios call you on your cell phone to tell you they loved your movie, it’s like, Are you serious? This is somebody I couldn’t even have gotten into the room with to audition for two years ago!”
Heigl’s movie price has risen to $6 million from the $300,000 she got for Knocked Up, according to a source involved with the production. And after a salary-renegotiation controversy with Grey’s Anatomy last year, when Heigl complained that she was paid less than her co-stars, her compensation has been raised to the level of such lead players as Ellen Pompeo, who has been reported to receive up to $200,000 per episode.
And now she has other goals in mind as well. “I’ve lived my 20s the way I wanted to, and I’m ready for a little more sacrifice, a little more commitment,” she says. “I want to be a mother; I want to start our family and focus on something other than my career. Kids are a huge sacrifice; they change everything—but I’m ready to work for things of greater importance than going out to meet someone for dinner at 10 o’clock at night.”
Although Los Angeles is a long way from the Currier & Ives scenes of her Connecticut childhood, she is hoping to provide her own children with some semblance of the wholesome world she herself once enjoyed. “I had a wonderful childhood,” she says. “Things were very simple. Everyone else went to beer parties; we played sardines and charades and Scrabble and went to Baskin-Robbins. It was innocent, and it was lovely—because life gets complicated soon enough. Life gets hard soon enough.”
Heigl Voltage
Leslie Bennetts is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
