Charlotte Kate Fox

Charlotte Kate Fox, born Charlotte Elizabeth Demo Varney on August 14, 1985, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is an American actress who has built a career spanning theater, television, and music across the United States and Japan. She is the daughter of Cynthia Demo, a real estate agent, and Edward Latin Varney III, who worked in the construction industry. Her parents divorced when she was nine, and her mother later remarried John Fox, with whom she had a son named William. Fox also has a half-brother named Matthew, who is sixteen years her senior.

Fox left her Catholic high school at sixteen to pursue acting through homeschooling. She studied theater at Marymount Manhattan College in New York for seven months before transferring to the College of Santa Fe, where she earned a BFA in Theater in 2008. Following graduation, she held various jobs, including working as a personal assistant to television presenter John Walsh. In 2010, she enrolled at Northern Illinois University, earning an MFA in 2013. During her time there, she attended summer workshops at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York. In 2015, the College of Santa Fe — by then renamed the Santa Fe University of Art and Design — awarded Fox an honorary doctorate, and she served as commencement speaker at the ceremony.

Her professional acting career began at sixteen with an appearance as an extra in the Starz series Crash. She subsequently worked in regional and professional theater productions, earning her union membership through a performance as Vanda in Venus in Fur at the Actor's Theatre of Charlotte. Her career shifted significantly when she was cast in the 150-episode NHK asadora Massan, which aired from 2014 to 2015. Selected from a pool of 521 applicants — 232 from Japan and 289 from outside the country — Fox portrayed Ellie, a character inspired by Rita Taketsuru, a Scotland-based businesswoman who relocated to Japan. The role made her the first non-Japanese performer to lead an asadora. Her performance was conducted almost entirely in Japanese, a language she had no prior experience with and had not visited Japan before her screen test. To manage the linguistic demands, her script included, alongside each Japanese line, a romanized version, an English translation, and a word-for-word literal translation following Japanese word order — resulting in a script ten times the length of those used by her Japanese co-stars. The series recorded a mean audience rating of 21.1% across its run, ranking third-highest among the previous twenty asadora titles, and when NHK polled viewers on their reasons for watching, 60% cited Fox, second only to the show's story and theme at 65%. The final episode aired on March 28, 2015.

Fox's Broadway credit is the long-running musical Chicago, which has been performed continuously at the Ambassador Theatre in New York since 1996. She was cast in the role of Roxie Hart, with her Broadway run taking place from November 2 to November 15, 2015. Following her Broadway engagement, she performed in a Japanese tour of Chicago in Tokyo from December 4 to December 23, 2015, and in Osaka on December 26 and 27, 2015.

Also in 2015, NHK aired a documentary on its satellite channel in which Fox traveled through Okinawa in search of traditional songs, marking her first visit to the region. On September 5, 2015, TV Asahi broadcast the made-for-TV film Detective Catherine, in which Fox played the lead role of Catherine Turner, a multilingual Columbia University graduate and the only daughter of a former United States vice president. The production, based on a detective novel series by Misa Yamamura, was performed primarily in Japanese.

Fox extended her work in Japan into music. On April 29, 2015, she released a single CD titled Gondola no Uta, followed by the album Wabi Sabi on August 19, 2015, produced by American artist Kishi Bashi. To support the album, she undertook an eight-city concert tour across Japan from August 18 to September 8, 2015, beginning in Shibuya, Tokyo and concluding in Natori, Miyagi. As of August 2015, she had also appeared in six television commercials in Japan, including campaigns for AEON and Nissan.

Fox was married to John Paul Moore from 2014 until their divorce in 2016. She subsequently married Christian Monsen on October 20, 2018.