Sex & Relationships

Grey’s Anatomy Star Kate Walsh

On TV, Kate Walsh is a sexually charged, romantically confused, fiercely intelligent surgeon. But TV isn’t real life.... In real life, she’s not a surgeon.

Kate Walsh can’t understand why her ass is so damn hot. It’s Manhattan in the 1990s, and Walsh’s breakthrough role as Grey’s Anatomy’s Dr. Addison Montgomery-Shepherd is a decade away. For now, she’s just a struggling waitress on a first date, riding in a BMW 5 Series, and unfamiliar with one of the newest features in luxury cars. “When you don’t know what a seat warmer is or that you’re sitting on one, how do you tell a guy you’re out with for the first time that your ass is burning up?”

Bimmer Man had superb tickets to Così fan tutte at the Metropolitan Opera, which is why Walsh—an opera fanatic—stuck it out, even when her date began taking bizarre liberties. “I get into the car, and the first thing this guy does is spray me with perfume,” says Walsh, laughing. “I don’t even know where it came from. Maybe it belonged to the last woman he killed.”

Today, Walsh has a BMW with heated seats of her own, and she can buy her own perfume, thank you. Dressed in layered lacy camisoles, a denim skirt, and knee-high Christian Louboutin boots the color of a Pacific sunset, the 39-year-old Walsh looks younger in person than she does as the romantically tormented—and tormenting—neonatologist she plays on TV. Her ivory skin is smoother, her cheekbones are more chiseled, and her features—that fiery red hair, those icy blue eyes—are much softer than those of her  preternaturally unflappable character who has loved (and let go of) two of prime time’s most dominant McAlpha males. Across the table at Puran’s Restaurant, in the hip but discreet L.A. neighborhood of Los Feliz (where she owns a  two-bedroom home that her recent success has helped her to buy and now renovate), Walsh is warm, friendly, inviting, and endearingly kooky. She is far more interested in learning about her dinner companion than she is in talking about herself. It’s not because Walsh prefers to be hidden, but rather that she possesses a quality increasingly rare in the solipsistic world that is Hollywood: inquisitiveness.

“I’m curious about everything in life, and lately I’ve been obsessed with my own mortality and the very real notion that life is short,” says Walsh. One reason for that is her encroaching 40th birthday, in October. Another has chased her since the death of her father, an Irish immigrant who later became a union leader (her mother is Italian), when she was 22. “That was the first hit I had of ‘Oh my God, it ends.’ ” That awareness of the fragility of life propels her need to get everything in—to travel and read and explore and cook and drive fast cars (she recently bought a 1985 Aston Martin)—yet she is trying at the same time to figure out a way to slow down. “I feel torn between having the time of my life and wanting very serious things, like a surplus of love for a family and all that,” says Walsh. “But what’s in front of me right now is work. Often, I think it would have been so great if this success had happened when I was 27 or 28, but then again, I wouldn’t have had the maturity back then to deal with it and not end up in rehab.”

Walsh can’t remember a time when she didn’t work. At 14, she manned the cash register at a Burger King in Tucson, Arizona, where she moved with her mother, stepfather, and four older brothers and sisters (two of each) after her parents divorced (the family spent its first 11 years in San Jose, California). Before that, her stepdad, a prison psychologist, paid her $5 a page to type up psychological profiles of inmates he treated. And in the past several years, she has worked regularly, if not recognizably, as an actress in both TV—as Drew Carey’s girlfriend on The Drew Carey Show, for which she plumped up with a fat suit—and films, like Under the Tuscan Sun, in which, coincidentally, she played the lesbian lover of Grey’s cast mate Sandra Oh.

But it’s her testicle-torquing turn as Patrick Dempsey’s cuckolding wife that has seared her into our consciousness. Originally, her role was written into only five episodes, introduced in the first season’s finale, in May 2005, as a noirish, wavy-haired, scarlet-lipped vixen in black Prada heels, the heartless siren who dared to cheat on McDreamy and was now singing her song to lure him away from Meredith Grey, the show’s title character. “I was aggressive and catty and witty,” she says. “It was fun.” Fun, yes, and convincing. So much so that Walsh’s tough-talking trollop proved too tantalizing to let go, and the show’s producers decided to extend her role. Good thing, too, as the episodes she had recently filmed for a new sitcom called The Men’s Room never made it to the airwaves. “My last job before Grey’s was playing a transvestite Las Vegas showgirl on CSI,” she remarks. “Let’s just say I was pleasantly surprised with the news.”

Walsh adapted easily to the pressures of working with a talented ensemble cast on the hottest, most successful set in television. Asked for her reaction to the blowup over Grey’s cast mate Isaiah Washington’s antigay remarks, she insists there has been “no fallout on the set, really,” but she can’t seem to hide her anger at the distraction. “We’re plowing through and working really hard and leaving it up to the powers that be. It was definitely sad. It’s annoying. And it eclipsed our Golden Globes win, which I was upset about.”