Katherine Heigl is an American actress. She played Dr. Izzie Stevens on the ABC television medical drama Grey's Anatomy from 2005 to 2010, a role that brought her recognition and accolades, including the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2007.
Heigl was born in Washington, D.C., in Columbia Hospital for Women. She is the youngest of four children of Nancy (née Engelhardt), a personal manager, and Paul Heigl, a financial executive and accountant. Her father is of Irish and German ancestry (including Swiss-German), and her mother is of German descent. Heigl lived in Northern Virginia and then Denver, before her family moved to the town of New Canaan, Connecticut, when Katherine was five, and where she lived the rest of her childhood.
In 1986, her older brother Jason died of injuries suffered in a car accident, after being thrown from the back of a pickup truck while out for lunch with some of his high school classmates. Her brother's death led Heigl's Lutheran mother and Catholic father to convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Heigl, then eight, was raised in that faith.
