Katherine Marie Heigl was born in Washington, DC, on November 24, 1978, to Nancy and Paul Heigl. A short time afterward, the family moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where Katherine was to spend the majority of her childhood; the youngest member of her family, Katherine--or "Katie" as she is nicknamed--has two elder siblings, John and Meg. Tragically, her older brother Jason died in 1986 of brain injuries suffered in a car accident, after being thrown from the back of a pickup truck. When doctors determined he was brain-dead, the family made the difficult decision to donate his organs. Not only did this painful chapter give Katherine a greater perspective and appreciation for life, but it motivated her to use her celebrity to promote the importance of organ donation.
Katherine was first thrust into the limelight as a child model. An aunt, visiting the family in New Canaan, took a number of photographs of Katherine, then aged nine, in a series of poses to advertise a hair care product she had invented. Upon returning to New York, with permission from Katherine's parents, she sent the photos to a number of modeling agencies. Within a few weeks Katherine had been signed to Wilhelmina, a renowned international modeling agency. Almost immediately she made her debut in a magazine advertisement and soon followed this with an inaugural television appearance in a national commercial for Cheerios breakfast cereal. Following a number of commercials and modeling assignments for Sears and Lord & Taylor, she made her big-screen debut in That Night (1992), which starred Juliette
Lewis and C. Thomas Howell. It was then that she realized that acting rather
than modeling was her passion. In 1993 Katherine appeared in Steven Soderbergh's critically acclaimed Depression-era drama King of the Hill (1993), before landing her first leading role as a rebellious teenager alongside Gérard
Depardieu in My Father the Hero (1994). During this time Katherine continued to
attend New Canaan High School, balancing her academic studies with work on films
and modeling, which she undertook during holidays, vacations and weekends.
In 1995, she played Sarah Ryback, the niece of Steven Seagal's character, in
Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995), which was her "debut" in the action film
genre. Acting was now becoming a stronger focus for Katherine, although she
still modeled extensively, appearing regularly in magazines such as "Seventeen."
Television appearances on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" (1992) and "Late
Night with Conan O'Brien" (1993) soon followed, before she took the lead role in
Disney's Wish Upon a Star (1996) in 1996. It was also during that year that
Katherine's parents divorced and, following her graduation from high school in
1997, she moved with her mother into a four-bedroom house in Los Angeles' Malibu
Canyon area. This enabled her to focus upon acting with the guidance and support
of her mother, who now managed her career.
In 1997, Katherine portrayed Taffy Entwhistle, Rita Hayworth's stand-in, in
Stand-ins (1997), and was also cast as the beauteous Princess Ilene in the
European production Prince Valiant (1997). She then made her made-for-TV movie
debut, co-starring with Peter Fonda in a re-working of the classic Shakespearean
play The Tempest (1998) (TV), updated with an American Civil War theme. In this
film, she played Miranda Prosper, a young woman torn between her love for both
her father and a Union soldier. Bug Buster (1998) and Bride of Chucky (1998)
represented a venture into the horror genre for Katherine. While both films
could be described as rather tongue-in-cheek despite their gory emphases, Bride
of Chucky (1998) was the better received, both critically and commercially.