Katharine Ross

Katharine Juliet Ross (born January 29, 1940) is an American film and stage actress. She had starring roles in three of the most popular films of the 1960s and 1970s: as Elaine Robinson in The Graduate (1967), for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress; as Etta Place in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), for which she won a BAFTA Award for Best Actress; and as Joanna Eberhart in The Stepford Wives (1975). She won a Golden Globe for Voyage of the Damned (1976).\n', ' Ross was born in Hollywood, California, on January 29, 1940 (though many sources cite 1942 or 1943) when her father, Dudley Ross, was in the Navy. He had also worked for the Associated Press. Her family later settled in Walnut Creek, California, east of San Francisco, and she graduated from Las Lomas High School in 1957. Ross was a keen horse rider in her youth and was friends with Casey Tibbs, a rodeo rider.\n', ' She studied at Santa Rosa Junior College for one year (1957–1958), where she was introduced to acting via a production of The King and I. She dropped out of the course and moved to San Francisco to study acting. She joined The Actors Workshop and was with them for three years (1959–1962) working as an understudy; for one role in Jean Genet\'s The Balcony she appeared nude on stage. In 1964 she was cast by John Houseman as Cordelia in a production of King Lear. While at the Workshop, she began acting in television series in Los Angeles to earn extra money. She was brought to Hollywood by Metro, dropped, then picked up by Universal.\n', '