Katee was born Kathryn Ann Sackhoff on April 8, 1980, in Portland, Oregon. About five weeks later, Mt. St. Helens exploded. As far as we know, the two events weren't related, but it was certainly an auspiscious debut. She has an older sister, Mylisa, and brother, Erick, and she grew up in the small Oregon town of St. Helens before moving to Portland in the sixth grade. Her father Dennis is a contractor and land developer and her mother Mary is a retired schoolteacher who also ran a volunteer English as a Second Language program for several years.
A competitive swimmer, Katee dreamed of going to Stanford and swimming in the Olympics, a dream that ended when she suffered a serious knee injury at age 15. That necessitated a change of plans, and Katee has said that she decided to try the most difficult thing she could think of, which was to go to Hollywood and succeed as an actress. She had started taking dance and drama classes at age 6, and continued studying drama in high school in Portland, where she appeared in numerous plays, including A Christmas Carol (as the Ghost of Christmas Past, which we'd love to have seen), Les Miserables, and A Streetcar Named Desire (as Blanche). She also appeared as an extra in the feature film Mr. Holland's Opus, which was filmed in Portland.
Katee's first break came when she auditioned for the Lifetime TV movie Fifteen and Pregnant, which was filming in Portland. She went down to try out as an extra and ended up with a speaking role instead. The film's director and his wife took an interest in her and encouraged her to move to Los Angeles after high school. Her parents agreed to support her in LA if she went to college, so she enrolled briefly at Loyola Marymount University. Soon, however, she was supporting herself as an actress, and dropped out of school to work. She landed the lead in an unsuccessful MTV pilot, Locust Valley, worked in a USA Network biography of Hugh Hefner (Hefner: Unauthorized), and had a recurring role on MTV's Undressed as well as other guest spots on TV shows. A stint on the Fox Family Channel's short-lived series The Fearing Mind followed, and then she was cast as the daughter of the title character in CBS's The Education of Max Bickford, in which she worked with Academy Award winners Richard Dreyfuss and Marcia Gay Harden. That role took her from Los Angeles to New York, where she lived while the series was in production. That series, too, was cancelled in 2002.
After a leading role in the horror sequel Halloween: Resurrection, Katee auditioned for the role of Starbuck in Ron Moore's reimagined Battlestar Galactica — despite not knowing much about the original series. (She didn't realize that Starbuck had originally been a man, for instance.) She won the part, and has since impressed the series's producers, writers, and her fellow actors with her portrayal of Kara Thrace, for which she won the 2006 Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress in a TV Series.
During the hiatus between seasons two and three of Battlestar Galactica, Katee managed to fit in not one but two films. In the first, an independent science fiction action film called The Last Sentinel, Katee co-stars with martial arts legend Don "The Dragon" Wilson, and got to do almost all of her own stunts. The second, White Noise: The Light, is a horror film in which Katee co-stars with fellow science fiction favorite Nathan Fillion. The Last Sentinel was recently shown on the SciFi Channel in the United States; White Noise: The Light was released theatrically in the United Kingdom in early 2007 and on DVD in the United States. More recently, Katee completed a Lifetime Network movie-of-the week called How I Married My High School Crush , in which she has the lead role, and she played the villain Sarah Corvus in Battlestar Galactica producer David Eick's remake of the classic Bionic Woman series for NBC. She also has done some voiceover work for Adult Swim's Robot Chicken and the video game Halo 3.
Katee is single, and has two dogs, a pug/chihuahua mix named Meatball, and a pug named Nelly B, after the character she played on Max Bickford. She lives in Los Angeles and also owns a house (now up for sale) in northern Washington State near the Canadian border, convenient for working in Vancouver.
Filmography
| The Bionic Woman (Guest star, 4 episodes, 2007) | Sarah Corvus | NBC |
How I Married My High School Crush |
Sara Jacobs | Lifetime |
| Robot Chicken (2007) | Wisp / College Student / Starbuck | Adult Swim (Cartoon Network ) |
| Battlestar Galactica (2003; 2005 – 2008) | Kara "Starbuck" Thrace | SciFi |
| The Education of Max Bickford (2001–2002) | Nell Bickford | CBS |
| The Fearing Mind (2000) | Lenore Fearing | Fox Family |
| Cold Case (episode "Volunteers", 2004) | Terri Maxwell (1969) | CBS |
| Boomtown (episode "The Big Picture", 2003) | Holly | NBC |
| ER (episode "A Hopeless Wound", 2002) | NF's Girlfriend | NBC |
| Undressed (Episodes 2.7 – 2.10, 2000) | Annie | MTV |
| Hefner: Unauthorized (1999) | Mary | USA |
| Chicken Soup for the Soul (episode "Starlight, Starbright", 1999) | Claire | PAX |
| Zoe, Duncan, Jack and Jane (episode "Sympathy for Jack", 1999) | Susan | WB |
| Locust Valley (unaired pilot, 1999) | Claire Shaw | MTV |
| Fifteen and Pregnant (1998) | Karen Gotarus | Lifetime |
| White Noise 2: The Light (2007) | Sherry Clarke | Brightlight/Gold Circle |
| The Last Sentinel (2007) | Girl | Gorilla |
| Halloween: Resurrection (2002) | Jen Danzig | Dimension Films |
| My First Mister (2001) | Ashley | Film Roman |
| Mr. Holland's Opus (1995) | extra (schoolgirl) in opening hallway scene | Hollywood |
Katee's Resumé
Two slightly different versions — click to enlarge.
 |
 |