Kate Walsh

American film and television actress Katherine Erin Walsh, Kate Walsh as she is known in show business, is widely known by television fans worldwide as Dr. Addison Montgomery on the ABC medical dramas Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice. While she was born in San Jose, California, Kate was raised in Tucson, Arizona, where she finished high school at Catalina Magnet. She then enrolled at the University of Arizona to study acting. While there, Walsh got involved in regional theater productions before moving to Chicago to work at the renowned Piven Theatre Workshop and eventually perform for the Chicago Shakespeare Repertory in plays such as Trolius and Cressida, Flesh and Blood, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, and A Pinter Landscape.

After a year, she transferred to New York City and joined the comedy troupe Burn Manhattan, with whom she got to perform in Off-Broadway productions of Flight Courier and The Four Twins. While in New York, Kate did several movie and television projects including her small-screen debut on NBC's crime drama Homicide: Life on the Street. Her first big break came when she was flew out from New York to Los Angeles to portray the obese real estate agent Nicki Fifer who dated and became engaged to Drew Carey in The Drew Carey Show. Working in L.A., she also had the chance to work with Nicolas Cage in The Family Man (2000), Diane Lane and Grey's Anatomy co-star Sandra Oh in Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), and Will Ferrell in Kicking & Screaming (2005).

Apart from a slew of not-so-memorable film appearances from the late-'90s to the mid-2000s, Walsh had notable roles on television as Jenny, Norm MacDonald's love interest on Norm, as Carol Nelson on the HBO comedy The Mind of a Married Man, and the transsexual Mimosa in an episode of CSI. In 2005, Kate was introduced as the ex-wife of Dr. Derek Shepherd (played by Patrick Dempsey) and ex-lover of Dr. Mark Sloane (played by Eric Dane) at the end of Grey's Anatomy's pilot season. For the next three seasons, her role as Seattle Grace' premier neonatal surgeon and her character's romantic entanglement with the hospital's top neurosurgeon and plastic surgeon would draw the attention of the series' countless fans and catapult Walsh into instant Hollywood stardom. In 2007, show creator Shonda Rhimes decided to come up with the series spin-off Private Practice and cast Walsh as the female lead.