Katherine Moennig Biography

Birth Name : Katherine Sian Moennig

Date of Birth : 29 December 1977, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Height : 5' 8" (1.73 m)

Occupation : Actress

Katherine Sian Moennig was born on December 29, 1976. She grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with her father, a violin maker, and her mother, a Broadway dancer. Katherine was born into an extended family of industry professionals. She is first cousins with Gwyneth Paltrow and Blythe Danner is her aunt. Katherine grew up surrounded by the entertainment industry and pursued acting from an early age.

Her first acting role came at age 10 in a Children's Theatre Workshop presentation of Winnie the Pooh. The experience led Katherine and a friend to write an improvised production of the story and perform it at the Free Library in Philadelphia. While in high school, Katherine kept the desire to pursue acting on the backburner until her studies were complete.

Lean, strikingly featured, and appealing to both male and female audiences, actress Katherine Moennig did not shy away from characters with strong sexual identities over the course of her career. Her first notices came while playing a young woman who masquerades as a boy in order to attend an all-male school in the short-lived WB series "Young Americans" (2000); three years later, she found more substantial fame as the self-destructive Shane McCutcheon on "The L Word" (Showtime, 2003- ). Her androgynous looks and choices of roles led many in the press to speculate about Moennig's own sexuality. That she skirted the issue in interviews seemed to indicate that Moennig had something to hide, but in reality, it only added to her appeal with viewers.