Phoebe Cates

Phoebe Belle Cates Kline, born July 16, 1963, in New York City, is an American actress, model, and businesswoman. She grew up in a family with deep roots in entertainment: her father, Joseph Cates, was a prominent Broadway producer and a pioneering figure in television who helped create The $64,000 Question, and her uncle, Gilbert Cates, produced multiple television specials and several Academy Awards ceremonies. Cates is of mixed heritage; her father was Russian Jewish from Manhattan, and her mother was born in Shanghai to a family of Chinese-Filipino background. Cates has a sister.

Cates was educated at the Professional Children's School and the Juilliard School. She had aspirations of becoming a dancer and earned a scholarship to the School of American Ballet, but a knee injury at age 14 ended that pursuit. She began modeling at age ten, appearing in Seventeen and other teen-oriented publications, including four covers of Seventeen, the first in April 1979. Despite a successful modeling career, she grew dissatisfied with the work and transitioned to acting.

Her film debut came with Paradise (1982), shot in Israel between March and May 1981, a role her father encouraged her to accept following a screen test in New York. That same year she appeared in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which Rolling Stone described as containing "the most memorable bikini-drop in cinema history." She went on to appear in Private School (1983), in which she sang two songs on the soundtrack, and starred in the 1984 television miniseries Lace, based on Shirley Conran's novel, playing the role of Lili. Her line from that production, "Which one of you bitches is my mother?", was named the greatest line in television history by TV Guide in 1993. She reprised her role in the sequel Lace II. Also in 1984, Cates co-starred in Gremlins, the highest-grossing film of her career, produced by Steven Spielberg, and later reprised her role as Kate Beringer in Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). Her subsequent film credits include Date with an Angel (1987), Bright Lights, Big City (1988), Shag (1988), Heart of Dixie (1989), Drop Dead Fred (1991), Bodies, Rest & Motion (1993), and Princess Caraboo (1994), the last of which she made alongside her husband, actor Kevin Kline.

Alongside her film work, Cates developed a parallel career in theater. In June 1984, she made her stage debut Off-Broadway in The Nest of the Wood Grouse, a comedy by Soviet writer Viktor Rozov, at the Joseph Papp Public Theater. Two years later she returned Off-Broadway in Rich Relations, written by David Henry Hwang, at the Second Stage Theatre. In December 1989, Cates made her Broadway debut in a revival of Paddy Chayefsky's The Tenth Man at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. In a 1988 interview, she had described theater as what she liked to do most, noting that it offered far more substantial roles for women than film.

Cates met actor Kevin Kline at auditions for The Big Chill in 1983, and the two married in a private ceremony in New York on March 5, 1989, after which she took the name Phoebe Cates Kline. They settled on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and raised two children: son Owen Joseph Kline, born in 1991, and daughter Greta Kline, born in 1994. Owen appeared in the 2005 film The Squid and the Whale and later made his directorial debut with the comedy Funny Pages. Greta is a musician who fronts the band Frankie Cosmos. Both children appeared alongside their parents in The Anniversary Party (2001), a film Cates made as a favor to her close friend and former Fast Times at Ridgemont High castmate Jennifer Jason Leigh, who directed it.

Following Princess Caraboo, Cates stepped back from acting to focus on raising her children. In 2005, she founded Blue Tree, a boutique on Madison Avenue in New York City, marking her transition into business.