Career Highlights: The L Word: Season 04, The L Word: Season 03, The L Word: Season 02
First Major Screen Credit: Young Americans (2000)
Biography
Katherine Moennig has been widely recognized for her gender-ambiguous looks; while her face is aesthetically beautiful, her ultra-skinny figure and short hair make her a convincing tomboy. As the era of the waif-look amongst supermodels came to a close, tiny figures like Moennig's earned a place in the new millennium -- where the trend was to be neither too masculine nor too feminine. Indeed, on the 2000 television series Young Americans, Moennig played a young woman who dresses up like a boy. Also known as "Kate," she was born on December 29, 1977, and raised in Philadelphia, PA, where the young hoyden came to recognize herself as slightly boyish even before it became an asset to her career. She moved to New York when she was 18 to begin training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and her post-graduation work included an internship at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. She would go on to gain exposure as a model as well as an actress, and appeared in a music video for rock band Our Lady Peace's song "Is Anybody Home?" Her growing fame is notably familial, as she is the niece of actress Blythe Danner, and thus the cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow. After her rise in popularity with the teen drama Young Americans and an appearance on Law & Order in 2001, Moennig has complemented her TV career with several film appearances. In 2001, she was featured in two Sundance Film Festival movies: in Love the Hard Way as Debbie, and Slo-Mo, in the role of Raven, amidst a young man's strange psychological time warp. Additionally, that same year she appeared in The Shipping News, starring Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, and Cate Blanchett. ~ Sarah Sloboda, All Movie Guide
Moennig is of German, Scottish and Irish descent.[4] She is called "Alt.Gwyn" by her friends, because she and Paltrow are so unlike each other.[1] "Alt.Gwyn" means "Alt. Gwyneth" or "Alternate Gwyneth".
Although there has been much speculation surrounding Moennig's sexual orientation due to the on-screen lesbian and genderqueer roles she has taken, Moenning refuses to talk about her sexuality because she says that having a personal life is a sacred thing in Hollywood. In 2000, in an interview with the advocate, Moennig stated that she was straight, and was dating a Hollywood actor whom she claimed, "knows what he wants".[1] However, the New York Post's Page Six reported sighting Moennig accompanied by Francesca Gregorini, in April 2005 at a party for Paper Magazine's Beautiful People issue.[5], and her L Word costar Jennifer Beals also muddied the issue in an interview with The Advocate in which Beals cited Moennig along with several out lesbians as advisors to her character protrayal of Bette Porter.[5] A rumour of Kate dating Clementine Ford after their collaboration in The L Word was denied by Ford in a Diva Magazine interview in 2009.[6]
Her first major role was in the television series Young Americans, playing Jake Pratt, a girl who enters the Rawley Boys Academy by passing as a boy and ends up falling in love with Hamilton (Ian Somerhalder), the Dean's son.
In 2008, Moennig played the role of Mary Landis, a suspect in season 6 episode 19 of CSI:Miami.
Katherine has several tattoos now. The number 2 on her right ring finger (which is her life number in numerology), a small red square on her left hand, a "cross" on her left wrist (which was previously the letter "K"), on her right triceps she has a tattoo of a swallow bird (she got it after having a dream that she had a tattoo of a bird on her right triceps), on her left triceps she has a tattoo that fans are saying reads 'audere est facere' ('to dare is to do' in Latin) , along her right side she has what appears to be a tattoo of ivy, on her right inner forearm she has a tattoo of the name "Mary," in honor of her mother, and lastly she has a tattoo of an outline of a violin with a letter "M" inside for her last name "Moennig" (which she got the day after her father died, in his honor).