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Life is Precarious
A life in acting appealed to Katherine Heigl because, she says, it lets her pretend to be someone else, like Izzie Stevens, the doctor with the colorful past on ABC's Grey's Anatomy, or Alison, the inconveniently pregnant girlfriend in Knocked Up, last summer's hit comedy. But Heigl's success -- Knocked Up made her one of Hollywood's most sought-after comic actresses -- comes only after a series of daunting personal hardships. Her struggles, and her triumph, make her at least as fascinating as any of the characters she portrays on-screen.The youngest of four in a close-knit family, the 29-year-old beauty, daughter of an accountant and a stay-at-home mom, grew up in Connecticut and quickly learned, as she puts it, "life is precarious" when her teenage brother Jason was killed in an auto accident. Before moving West to pursue her career, she lived through a loved one's harrowing battle with cancer and weathered her parents' breakup.
Now Heigl's life is full -- of good things. Between shooting Grey's, for which she won an Emmy and was nominated for a Golden Globe, promoting her current film, 27 Dresses (another romantic comedy) and preparing to wed singer-songwriter Josh Kelley, she sat down with RD and proved that behind her very pretty face, she doesn't have to be anybody other than the person she is.
RD: I hate to start an interview on a sad note, but your success grew out of some very hard times. You were 16. You were all ready to head to L.A. to pursue your acting career. Then your mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Heigl: My mom's actually a really good example of why women need to get regular mammograms. By the time she found the lump in the shower one morning, it was so huge that you couldn't ignore it. She ended up having a lumpectomy, and then chemo and then a mastectomy.
RD: Did that frighten you?
Heigl: As soon as the doctor said it was malignant, all I thought was that my mother was going to die. Then she went through nine months of hard-core chemo. I make my mother sound like a saint, but she kind of is. I've never seen anybody handle things the way she does. She lost all her hair. We would sit there with her during her chemo, and [the drug they were giving her] was red, like Kool-Aid. So my mother had a big Kool-Aid party when she was done with chemo. Everybody wore bandannas and drank Kool-Aid and celebrated. I'm sure she must have had her moments, but she never really let on. It's made me feel, Okay, breast cancer is not the end of the world. Her approach was always to look to her future.
RD: So is she fine today?
Heigl: Knock on wood, yeah.
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