In her youth Katharine Ross possessed such a bracing beauty and strong independent spirit that she became an iconic figure of the late 1960s with appearances in such films as The Graduate (1967) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). If she never again rose to those heights, she has remained an attractive and dependable performer in television roles and often-minor movies.

Born Katharine Juliet Ross in 1940 in Hollywood, she began acting in stage productions in the San Francisco area. Beginning in 1962 she frequently played featured roles on network television, often in Westerns. Her feature-film debut came in the James Stewart Western Shenandoah (1965), but it was The Graduate that put her in the spotlight. In Mike Nichols' innovative comedy, Ross was a breath of fresh air as Elaine Robinson, a college-age charmer who unknowingly shares a lover (Dustin Hoffman) with her mother (Anne Bancroft). Among the movies' seven Oscar® nominations was one for Ross as Best Supporting Actress.

After a thankless appearance as fire-fighter John Wayne's daughter in Hellfighters (1968), Ross found another attention-getting role as the leading lady of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. She worked well with Redford again in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), although she was miscast as a Native American.

Beginning with Fools (1970), Ross began working in distinctly lower-profile movies, occasionally breaking the pattern with films such as The Stepford Wives (1975) and Voyage of the Damned (1976). For the latter film, in which she movingly plays the "fallen" daughter of a Jewish couple on an ocean liner in limbo in the days preceding World War II, Ross won a Golden Globe as Best Supporting Actress.

By 1980 Ross was again working more often in television than movies, although she has in more recent years appeared in Donnie Darko (2001) and Eye of the Dolphin (2006). She met her second husband, actor Sam Elliott, when the two costarred in the film The Legacy (1978). They married in 1984 and have a daughter. Ross also has enjoyed success as the author of children's books.

by Roger Fristoe