Katherine Dee Strickland (born December 14, 1975) is an American actress. She is known for her role of Dr. Charlotte King on the ABC drama Private Practice (2007–2013).
Strickland began acting during high school. She studied acting in Philadelphia and New York City, where she obtained mostly small roles in film, television, and stage projects, among them The Sixth Sense (1999). Her participation in the 2003 Hollywood films Anything Else and Something's Gotta Give led to her receiving significant parts in the 2004 horror films Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid and The Grudge. She was then referred to as "the pride of Patterson" and the horror genre's "newest scream queen", though her performances in both films received mixed critical reviews. In 2005, she garnered positive critical reviews for the romantic comedy Fever Pitch, and she was a regular on the television show The Wedding Bells in 2007. She was subsequently added to the cast of Private Practice.
Strickland has spoken against the emphasis placed on beauty in the Los Angeles acting community, in which she says her Southern U.S. background has helped to distinguish herself from other blonde actresses. She has spoken of an affinity for her strong female characters and a desire to avoid sexualizing or sensationalizing her self-presentation as a woman. She has also worked closely with RAINN after participating in a storyline in which her Private Practice character was sexually assaulted.
Katherine Dee Strickland was born in Blackshear, Georgia, on December 14, 1975, to Susan, a nurse, and Dee Strickland, a high school football coach, principal, and superintendent. Her nickname comes from her parents combining the "K" in her first name with her father's name (and also her middle name) to make "KaDee". She was raised in Patterson, Georgia, which she referred to as a "one-stoplight town", and she had a job picking tobacco on a local farm for eight years. When she was a child, Strickland watched the Woody Allen film Annie Hall (1977) and was "wanting to be in that place, and being completely taken with the energy of those people [...] [she] wanted to be in it". During her childhood, she was well known locally as a member of the Strickland family and for her extracurricular activities and achievements; she was the Homecoming Queen in elementary, middle, and high school, as well as the student council president and a cheerleader. She never considered a career in the arts until her participation in a one-act play performed by students of her high school: "The minute I set foot on stage, that was it. Destiny took over. There were no other options. I felt like I fit my skin, I knew what I was here to do."
After graduating from high school, Strickland wanted to study drama at college in New York City, but her parents did not want her to live in such a large city so soon. She instead applied to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. During her studies there, she joined the Screen Actors Guild and considered using her given name as the first part of her stage name, before deciding she was "much too tomboy" for it. She took a part-time job as a waitress at a local restaurant and interned at a casting agency, where one of her tasks was to read lines at auditions for small roles in local film and television projects; the job landed Strickland her first film role. After graduating from university with a fine arts degree, she was schooled in New York City, and she moved to Los Angeles in late 2003. In 2006, she received the University of the Arts's Silver Star Alumni Award.
Strickland's career began in 1999 with a brief appearance at a funeral after-party in The Sixth Sense, a two-line part that she received after impressing writer-director M. Night Shyamalan when reading lines for those auditioning for the film. According to Strickland, her role in the film helped her learn to temper her fake crying. The same year, she served as an extra in the independent film The Sterling Chase, and appeared in a small role opposite Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie in James Mangold's drama Girl, Interrupted.
When staying in Philadelphia, Strickland had opportunities to take part in other films in production in and around the city. Those included Rel Dowdell's Train Ride, a date rape thriller filmed in 1998, but not commercially released until 2005 because of financing problems. She was also cast in the crime drama Diamond Men with Robert Forster and Donnie Wahlberg; it opened to sparkling reviews, with Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times declaring it "a fantastic film, with a good cast". After she moved to New York City, Strickland appeared in Adam Bhala Lough's filmmaking debut, Bomb the System, which received unenthusiastic notices from critics and was not shown outside film festivals until 2005.
Concurrent to her film work, Strickland acquired stage experience in productions such as A Requiem for Things Past in mid-1999, and John Patrick Shanley's Women of Manhattan. She acted in a December 2002 episode of the television show Law & Order: Criminal Intent and made nine guest appearances on All My Children, which enabled her to leave her waitressing job. In 2003, Strickland was cast opposite Eddie Cibrian in the pilot episode for an uncommissioned small screen serial adaptation of John Grisham's novel The Street Lawyer.
Strickland appeared in two romantic comedy films in 2003. Anything Else, written and directed by Woody Allen, featured her as the girlfriend of Jason Biggs's character (whom he snubs for Christina Ricci's Amanda Chase); she said it was a "dream come true" to work with Allen, of whom she is an "obsessive diehard" fan. The film was greeted with lukewarm reviews and dismal ticket sales, though Strickland later referred to it as her "big break". The second, Something's Gotta Give (starring Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton), was a major critical and commercial success, though Strickland's part in the film was brief. She played the girlfriend of Keaton's character's ex-husband (played by Paul Michael Glaser), a relationship involving age disparity that raised the eyebrows of Keaton and her daughter (Amanda Peet). The following year, she made brief appearances in the direct-to-cable independent film Knots and the poorly received satirical comedy The Stepford Wives with Nicole Kidman, playing a partygoer and a game show contestant, respectively.
Strickland's first lead role came when producer Doug Belgrad saw the dailies of her scene in Something's Gotta Give. He cast her opposite Johnny Messner and Morris Chestnut in the jungle-set horror film Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, the sequel to Anaconda (1997). Strickland played an accomplished research scientist who travels to Borneo as part of an expedition team searching for a species of plant rumored to have life-extending properties. She said she initially did not want to follow a Woody Allen film with a "snake movie", but that she changed her mind because the hero was a female Southerner who was not "a complete idiot" or "a chick in shorts about to get whacked". Though its box office revenue tripled its production budget, Anacondas did not perform as well as its predecessor, and most reviews panned the project. The cast received positive comment from Variety magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times's Roger Ebert, but a critic for the San Diego Union-Tribune said the film was "so stupidly plotted and badly acted, it becomes unintentionally funny", and described Strickland and her co-stars' work as "garden-variety bad". Other reviews focused on the attractiveness of Strickland and her castmates; Slant Magazine said "[the film is] populated with anonymous, attractive plastic people from the Los Angeles talent pool." During the same period, The Florida Times-Union referred to her as "the pride of Patterson".
Strickland's next project, The Grudge, was another horror film. In Japanese director Takashi Shimizu's American remake of his film Ju-On: The Grudge (2003), Strickland played (in a role originated by Misaki Ito) a Tokyo-based American businesswoman whose relatives emigrate from the United States. Strickland received the role through a casting session with producer Sam Raimi, who picked her based on her work in footage for the then-unreleased Anacondas, and her willingness to work away from home for extended periods. She said that Japan and Japanese cinema had always fascinated her, and that she wanted to be "a part of that world" in which filmmakers communicate the story via action rather than dialogue; she also highlighted the importance of being "able to explore being in the wrong place at the wrong time without being a sex object/damsel in distress." The Grudge was a number-one U.S. box office hit and quickly became one of the year's most profitable films, but reviews were lukewarm. The Charlotte Observer wrote "the cast is drab and lifeless", and earned "nothing but demerits". Strickland's presence in The Grudge and Anacondas led horror fans to name her "[their] newest scream queen", but she said that when deciding what film to do next, she did not focus as much on genre as she did on good characters, scripts, and directors, which she said "don't come around that often." For the scene in which her character hides under her bed covers, Strickland received a 2005 Teen Choice Award nomination for Choice Movie Scary Scene.