Grey’s Anatomy Star Kate Walsh

On TV, Kate Walsh is a sexually charged, romantically confused, fiercely intelligent surgeon. But TV isn’t real life.... In real life, she’s not a surgeon.

Kate Walsh can’t understand why her ass is so damn hot. It’s Manhattan in the 1990s, and Walsh’s breakthrough role as Grey’s Anatomy’s Dr. Addison Montgomery-Shepherd is a decade away. For now, she’s just a struggling waitress on a first date, riding in a BMW 5 Series, and unfamiliar with one of the newest features in luxury cars. “When you don’t know what a seat warmer is or that you’re sitting on one, how do you tell a guy you’re out with for the first time that your ass is burning up?”

Bimmer Man had superb tickets to Così fan tutte at the Metropolitan Opera, which is why Walsh—an opera fanatic—stuck it out, even when her date began taking bizarre liberties. “I get into the car, and the first thing this guy does is spray me with perfume,” says Walsh, laughing. “I don’t even know where it came from. Maybe it belonged to the last woman he killed.”

Today, Walsh has a BMW with heated seats of her own, and she can buy her own perfume, thank you. Dressed in layered lacy camisoles, a denim skirt, and knee-high Christian Louboutin boots the color of a Pacific sunset, the 39-year-old Walsh looks younger in person than she does as the romantically tormented—and tormenting—neonatologist she plays on TV. Her ivory skin is smoother, her cheekbones are more chiseled, and her features—that fiery red hair, those icy blue eyes—are much softer than those of her preternaturally unflappable character who has loved (and let go of) two of prime time’s most dominant McAlpha males. Across the table at Puran’s Restaurant, in the hip but discreet L.A. neighborhood of Los Feliz (where she owns a two-bedroom home that her recent success has helped her to buy and now renovate), Walsh is warm, friendly, inviting, and endearingly kooky. She is far more interested in learning about her dinner companion than she is in talking about herself. It’s not because Walsh prefers to be hidden, but rather that she possesses a quality increasingly rare in the solipsistic world that is Hollywood: inquisitiveness. kateinline1_1.jpg

“I’m curious about everything in life, and lately I’ve been obsessed with my own mortality and the very real notion that life is short,” says Walsh. One reason for that is her encroaching 40th birthday, in October. Another has chased her since the death of her father, an Irish immigrant who later became a union leader (her mother is Italian), when she was 22. “That was the first hit I had of ‘Oh my God, it ends.’ ” That awareness of the fragility of life propels her need to get everything in—to travel and read and explore and cook and drive fast cars (she recently bought a 1985 Aston Martin)—yet she is trying at the same time to figure out a way to slow down. “I feel torn between having the time of my life and wanting very serious things, like a surplus of love for a family and all that,” says Walsh. “But what’s in front of me right now is work. Often, I think it would have been so great if this success had happened when I was 27 or 28, but then again, I wouldn’t have had the maturity back then to deal with it and not end up in rehab.”

Walsh can’t remember a time when she didn’t work. At 14, she manned the cash register at a Burger King in Tucson, Arizona, where she moved with her mother, stepfather, and four older brothers and sisters (two of each) after her parents divorced (the family spent its first 11 years in San Jose, California). Before that, her stepdad, a prison psychologist, paid her $5 a page to type up psychological profiles of inmates he treated. And in the past several years, she has worked regularly, if not recognizably, as an actress in both TV—as Drew Carey’s girlfriend on The Drew Carey Show, for which she plumped up with a fat suit—and films, like Under the Tuscan Sun, in which, coincidentally, she played the lesbian lover of Grey’s cast mate Sandra Oh.

But it’s her testicle-torquing turn as Patrick Dempsey’s cuckolding wife that has seared her into our consciousness. Originally, her role was written into only five episodes, introduced in the first season’s finale, in May 2005, as a noirish, wavy-haired, scarlet-lipped vixen in black Prada heels, the heartless siren who dared to cheat on McDreamy and was now singing her song to lure him away from Meredith Grey, the show’s title character. “I was aggressive and catty and witty,” she says. “It was fun.” inlinequote.jpg Fun, yes, and convincing. So much so that Walsh’s tough-talking trollop proved too tantalizing to let go, and the show’s producers decided to extend her role. Good thing, too, as the episodes she had recently filmed for a new sitcom called The Men’s Room never made it to the airwaves. “My last job before Grey’s was playing a transvestite Las Vegas showgirl on CSI,” she remarks. “Let’s just say I was pleasantly surprised with the news.”

Walsh adapted easily to the pressures of working with a talented ensemble cast on the hottest, most successful set in television. Asked for her reaction to the blowup over Grey’s cast mate Isaiah Washington’s antigay remarks, she insists there has been “no fallout on the set, really,” but she can’t seem to hide her anger at the distraction. “We’re plowing through and working really hard and leaving it up to the powers that be. It was definitely sad. It’s annoying. And it eclipsed our Golden Globes win, which I was upset about.”

Despite the distractions, Walsh soldiers on, as she has always done when life hasn’t abided her desires. As a tomboyish little girl, all she wanted was a set of walkie-talkies. Instead, her parents gave her a CB radio. Her handle was Katie-Kat, a childhood nickname. “I was in the fourth grade talking to truckers,” she said. “I loved it.”

In high school, she tried out to be a song leader, which is something like a cheerleader but with more dancing and less athleticism—“Sort of like what the Laker Girls do,” she says. For the audition, Walsh dressed in a gold leotard and tights, rubbed her body from head to toe with gold powder, and sang “Twilight Zone,” a 1982 demi-hit from the Dutch hard-rock band Golden Earring. Walsh had the lyrics down, but for reasons she still can’t explain, her body froze. “I did the same dance move over and over for the entire song, and the judges just stared at me.” Walsh didn’t make song leaders, no surprise. But she did make the shot-put team, and even earned a junior varsity letter. “That’s when I learned my strength lay in hurling heaving, massive balls.”

Walsh began her acting career studying at the Piven Theatre Workshop, in Chicago. It was in the Windy City where she made lifelong friends with screenwriter and director Adam McKay, who later introduced her to Will Ferrell. (The three of them worked together in the 2005 comedy Kicking & Screaming.) She continued on to New York with the hope of doing theater and independent films, but steady TV work determined her career choices, while sometimes undermining her romantic ones.

“I need to do with relationships what I’ve done with work,” says Walsh, who admits to having leaped into not-so-appropriate liaisons as an escape from the stress of her day job. “In the past, I’ve been work, work, work—and then I’m done and ’cause I’m tired and desperate, I’m like…YOU!” she shouts out, as though grasping for the nearest warm male body. The result has been passionate unions with men who weren’t good for her but were “too tempting and snaky and delicious and sexy” to resist. In some ways, these passionate mismatches served their purpose for Walsh. “In the past, I think I’ve looked to men to slow me down and help me rest,” she says. “Picking people who weren’t so available allowed me to be selfish.”

But Walsh realizes that perhaps she wasn’t the only one who was being selfish. Men have often had difficulty with her commitment to work, and her most recent serious relationship came to an end shortly after she secured her part on Grey’s Anatomy. Often, she has found herself landing a consuming role, she claims, only to have the man in her life say, “Hey, I know you’re an actress, but you’re really going to do this?” kateinline2_1.jpg

Not so ironically, perhaps, Walsh seeks in a man the same characteristics that are just beginning to emerge within herself: consistency, ­compassion, and the ability to be present in the now. “I’m a bit of a late bloomer,” she says, although it’s clear that, until now, Walsh simply hadn’t been ready for the constancy of a domestic partnership. “I realize it’s a juvenile fear, but I haven’t wanted to be in a relationship where I’m doing a downward dog and some guy is just like, ‘I hate you. I hate it when you do whatever that thing is that you do that I hate.’ ”

These days, though, she looks forward to being hated, loved, and everything in between. She slips into a stream-of-consciousness ramble about the perfect romance: “It’s a weird dance, when we’re in the same physical space but doing our own thing, and I’m here and he’s there and sometimes we’re madly and passionately f--king and other times I’m like, ‘I don’t even know who you are.’ But that’s real and you get through it and you keep going and you love him, but sometimes you don’t, and you want to have sex with him, but if not, that’s okay too, because in a little while, an hour or a day or a few days later, you will.”

And this future as-yet-unknown guy whom the willowy 5-foot-9 Walsh will mostly love but sometimes hate doesn’t have to be an Adonis.

“I don’t need someone with a hot body. He can be fat or overweight and have a belly. It’s very much about style and substance and humor, interest, curiosity, and being really smart.” And literate. When it comes to books, Walsh is an unabashed Anglophile and pores over works written by modern British authors both dead (Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh) and alive (Ian McEwan is her current favorite).

As Grey’s winds down its third season, Walsh finds the boundaries between herself and her character beginning to blur, perhaps a bit more than feels entirely comfortable. “With an hour-long drama, you start playing a little closer to who you are, because the writers hear you and are around you and they start writing for you,” she says, explaining how her character became more vulnerable and complex.

When first preparing for her role of Derek Shepherd’s wayward wife, says Walsh, “I remember wondering, Why did she cheat? Why? Why? Why?” But later, as Addison becomes more three-dimensional and more human, it becomes evident. “She was lonely in her marriage,” says Walsh. “Without it, she’s now lonely at Seattle Grace.”

This is where art becomes a little too much like life for Walsh. “Here I am working 13-, sometimes 16-hour days, and trying to date and it’s so new to me to date more than one person at a time. Sometimes I feel like, What am I doing? Am I becoming my character, or is my character becoming me?” says Walsh, who hopes the show’s writers settle her into a happy relationship sometime soon. “I’m starting to get a little superstitious here. I definitely identify with my character in that, romantically at least, this is not where I thought I’d be at 39.”

Still, finally becoming known as an actress (rather than just working as one) and, yes, being so busy, has forced Walsh to reset her priorities. She no longer looks to men to relax and relieve her stress, and often rejects wild nights out in favor of quiet evenings at home alone, drinking wine in front of the fireplace in her flannel pj’s, a good book in her hands, and her dog, Lucy, and cats, Billy and Pablo, by her side. “Part of me is like a 19-year-old boy who wants to go out and party,” says Walsh, “but there’s another part of me that’s 80 and needs to go home before I break.”

Understanding such things about herself has prepared Walsh for what she hopes is her next big thing: love. “I love my life, but I’m also eager to share it. I’m a total romantic, but also reticent and skeptical, ’cause I think some people have a lot of flowery rhetoric and love to write a 16-page e-mail describing everything they’re thinking about you, but it’s more about their own proselytizing and not necessarily knowing how to actually show up.”

And she doesn’t mind if the man who finally does show up is carrying along some personal baggage. “You don’t want to date a guy who’s 39 or 40 and hasn’t been in a committed relationship before and doesn’t have a romantic history,” she says. “Because that’s the guy who sprays perfume on you and puts the seat warmers on.”

Source: bestlifeonline.com