Somehow, Suri fits in as well. In Hebrew, it means princess" and in Persian red rose". It also means pickpocket" in Japanese, though the happy new parents probably weren't aware of that before the arrival of their rose-tinted princess on Tuesday. She will be baptised into the Church of Scientology and not into her mother's Catholic faith, said her father.

Katie Holmes is a Scientologist these days, he says. Her parents, he also says, are just fine about that.

According to pretty much everyone else, they might beg to differ. Back home in Toledo, Ohio, lawyer Martin and his wife Kathleen Holmes are devout Catholics who sent their five children to schools run by religious orders. Katherine Noelle is their youngest, a tiny baby who checked in a scary two months early and compensated for her prematurity by excelling academically and socially from an early age at Notre Dame Academy.

She was also a gifted athlete and, when she stretched to become a lanky teenager, it was expected that she would replicate her father's impressive college basketball record. A freak accident when a schoolmate hit her in the eye left her with permanent blurred vision and ended her hopes of a sporting career.

Instead, she turned to modelling. In an effort to curb her nascent tomboy tendencies, her mother had enrolled her at Margaret O'Brien's Modelling School and, when she was 16, she attended the International Modelling and Talent Convention in New York.

She returned home without any offers but with a conviction that acting, not modelling, offered the greater stimulus.

She'd caught the eye of an influential talent manager in New Yo r k who encouraged her to go to Los Angeles for a pilot season.

Taking six weeks off school, she headed west with her initially reluctant father, but in spite of a cacophony of positive noises, she again came home empty handed. Six months later, however, during her final year at Notre Dame, she landed a role opposite Tobey Maguire in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm.

She'd enrolled at Columbia University in New York by the time Kevin Williamson received her audition tape.

The director of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summerwanted to create a smart new TV soap aimed at teenagers and based on his own youth. Dawson's Creek was to be an ensemble piece for four principals and in Katie Holmes he immediately knew he'd found one.

She deferred her place at Columbia and moved to North Carolina to start filming during the summer of 1997. A year later, with Dawson's Creek cresting the ratings, she deferred her college place again.

In the end, she attended Columbia only for a summer course in photography in 2000.

She was the only actor to appear in all 128 episodes of the show, which ran for five years and is still the subject of a bewildering number of slavish websites.

The off-screen relationships proved as tantalising for the legions of Creek fans as the fictional ones: Holmes and one of her co-stars, Joshua Jackson, dated throughout the first season but by 1999 she was living with American Pie star Chris Klein.

In spite of filming schedules that ran for 10 months of each year, she made a string of movies during the five years of Dawson's Creek. After taking lead roles in a number of forgettable teen flicks, she opted to pursue smaller roles in bigger films, and worked with Helen Mirren, Robert Downey Jr and Michael Douglas.

In 2002, she played support to Colin Farrell in Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth and a year later took the lead in the critically-acclaimed Abandon. She followed it up by turning down the huge teen sex comedy, 40 Days and 40 Nights, in favour of the worthier (though infinitely less successful) big-screen version of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective.

By the end of 2004, she had an engagement ring worth half a million dollars on her finger, a career curve whose trajectory was, if not soaring, then certainly upward, and a promotional tour for her latest film, Batman Begins, to undertake.

As the caped crusader's love interest, it would be her most high-profile appearance . . . but it wasn't her celluloid career that abruptly turned her into tabloid fodder in the early weeks of 2005.

Less than a month after her publicist unexpectedly announced that she and Chris Klein had split, word seeped through that Katie Holmes was dating Tom Cruise, 16 years her senior. They had met, it was said, at a movie business function and at least one of them was very much in love.

The fact that both were embarking on promotional tours for two massivelybudgeted films initially drew a cynical reaction from the industry media, but by the time Cruise bounced around Oprah Winfrey's studio the relationship seemed like more than a publicist's wet dream.

Holmes, even then the (relatively) silent partner, told the world that she used to have Cruise's posters on her bedroom wall and had dreamed of marrying him.

Maybe straight-A students in Toledo, Ohio really did dream of marrying Tom Cruise in the 1990s (when he was already married), but still, there was something about the TomKat circus that didn't quite ring true. Her appearance at his side at just the time when he'd fired two publicists in quick succession and had incurred the wrath of several of his fellow actors with almost aggressive promotion of Scientology . . . as well as the onslaught of persistent rumours about Cruise's sexuality . . . seemed like somebody else's good idea. But he jumped on Oprah's sofa and they got engaged at the top of the Eiffel Tower and Katie got pregnant and now they are three.

Or five, to be pedantic. Of the many discomforting aspects of the Cruise and Holmes Show, the seeming relegation of Cruise's two adopted children to the lower leagues of his affections is amongst the least palatable. For her part, Holmes has said little about Cruise's older children or his ex-wives or, indeed, about anything.

The more sensational American tabloids have suggested that she's been brainwashed, though Cruise says that's nonsense. He said that if she wanted, she could have an epidural during the ?silent birth", though it's not clear if she did. He says he gets on great with her family. He once said Brooke Shields shouldn't have taken drugs to treat her post-natal depression. Sometimes, the least of a new mother's problems is having a baby whose name is the Japanese for pickpocket.

Somewhere in the TomKat circus, there's a nice girl called Katie Holmes who once wished she could marry Tom Cruise. Maybe she still does. Or maybe she's beginning to understand the old adage about being careful what you wish for.

CV Occupation: Actor Born: 18 December 1978; Toledo, Ohio Educated: Notre Dame Academy, Ohio; Columbia University, New York (briefly) In the news: After a rather bizarre courtship, she gave birth to her and Tom Cruise's child, Suri, this week