Kate knew very early that she wanted to become an actress. She was born into a family of actors, her grandparents owned a little theater.  At the age of eleven she was sent to Redroofs Theatre School in Maidenhead.

Her first job was a little role in a Sugar Puffs commercial, where she had to dance with the honey monster. Her debut in TV she had in 1988 in the British drama Shrinks, followed by several appearances in TV shows like Casuality (1989), Dark Season (1991), Get Back (1992) and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1993).

Also she had roles in a lot of theater plays, i.e. “Pandora”, in the musical “Adrian Mole”, “Wendy” in “Peter Pan”, “Sarah” in “A Game Of Soldier” and “Geraldine” in “What The Butler Saw” (for this roles she was nominated for the Manchester Evening News Award.)

“Since I was thirteen or fourteen I always felt older than I actually was,” Kate remembers.

Her youth was everything but easy – she had depressions and was kind of heavy (which brought her the nickname “Bubble”). But despite these problems Kate was meant to be an actress.

Eight days after her graduation at Maidenhead Kate got her role in Get Back and at the age of sixteen she fell in love with actor Stephen Tredre, whom she got to know at the set of Dark Season. They were a couple for five years. But then they split up when Stephen became ill with cancer.

“He was always there for me,” Kate says, “even when I had more than 80kg he never said I should lose weight.” His death was hard for Kate, she canceled a lot of press conferences and appointments to be alone.

Kate’s breakthrough was her role as Juliet Hulme in “Heavenly Creatures” (‘Not many have seen, but much discussed’). While Kate was promoting her movie in the USA, an agent of the William Morris Agentur came to meet her at a hotel in New York. He brought her the role of princess Sarah in “A Kid In King Arthur’s Court” (1995). The movie was mainly ignored, but later that year she had a big success with “Sense and Sensibility”. She played her role as Marianne Dashwood so well that she got her first Oscar nomination.

After all Kate became in Hollywood a kind of sex symbol.

A year later Kate was shooting Jude (as Sue Bridehead) and Hamlet (as Ophelia). Both roles got excellent critics, but were ignored at the Oscars.

At the moment Kate is one of the most talented newcomers. The Los-Angeles-Magazine listed her at their ‘The 40 most important people below 40′ and People-Magazine chose her as one of the ’50 most beautiful people’ of the world. Such recognitions brought her titles like ‘Starlet Express’ and ‘English Rose’.

Her role in Titanic maybe was the best, but it surely was the most successful she ever had. After that triumph she got flooded with offers for new movies. Her next film Hideous Kinky was shown rarely at German theaters, but is thankfully available on video, not like her following film Holy Smoke that is not known in Germany at all.

During shooting her movie she also met her husband Jim Threapleton with whom she has a little daughter Mia. Unfortunately the two split up in early autumn this year, after three years of marriage.