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Katherine Heigl is a beloved actress, who has starred in tons of hit TV shows, plus beloved romcoms and other films. While she’s received so much critical acclaim for hit TV shows like Firefly Lane and Suits, as well as movies like 27 Dresses and Knocked Up, Katherine’s breakout role was as Izzie Stevens on the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy between 2005 and 2010. The cast of Grey’s Anatomy is reuniting for the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards on Monday, January 15, 2024, and Katherine will join her former cast mates.
Off-screen, Katherine is a loving wife and mother. She’s been married to singer-songwriter Josh Kelley since 2007, and the pair have three beautiful children. She’s shown that she clearly adores her children. “My children are not just the light of my life, they’re sort of the light in my life. They’ve focused me. They’ve grounded me and given me purpose,” she said in a 2018 interview on Today.
Before Katherine takes the stage at the Emmys, get to know more about her three kids here!
Naleigh
Naleigh joins her mom on a red carpet in 2014. (Broadimage/Shutterstock)
Josh and Katherine got married in 2007, and two years later, they adopted their first daughter Nancy Leigh, 15, whom they nicknamed “Naleigh,” from South Korea. Katherine revealed that having had an adopted sister herself, she wanted to have a similar family of her own. ” I wanted my own family to resemble the one I came from, so I always knew I wanted to adopt from Korea. We have talked about having biological children as well, but we decided to adopt first. I just wanted to be a mom. So however we do that, it’s fine with me,” she told Scholastic Parent & Child, via People.
Naleigh was born with a congenital heart problem and had to undergo surgery before leaving Korea, the Suits actress revealed in a 2010 interview with Harper’s Bazaar. “Her heart is 100 percent fine now. She has a scar, so she won’t be wearing bikinis, which is fine by us,” she joked at the time.
In that same interview, she spoke about the values she wanted to instill in her daughter. “I want her privilege to afford her to seek many different things that might fulfill her. I don’t want her to have a Beemer on her 16th birthday or spend the summer at a beach house with friends. Nope. You want a beach house, you pay for it,” she said.
Katherine regularly shares tributes to her daughter on her birthday. In 2021, she posted a throwback of the photos she first received when she adopted Naleigh. She wrote a beautiful post for her daughter when she was turning 15 in November 2023. ” It’s hard for me to find the words to properly express the depths of my love for this beautiful, tender-hearted, thoughtful baby of mine. No words feel profound enough to do this love justice. I will try. Nothing prepares you for becoming a mother,” she wrote in part. “I have somehow miraculously ended up with a daughter whose gentle spirit, sense of responsibility and goodness, beauty and patience astounds me. I wish I could take credit for it but the magical young woman Naleigh has become has more to do with her beautiful spirit than it has to do with me.”
While Naleigh was still a tween, the 27 Dresses star also admitted that she didn’t let her daughter have social media in a Parents Magazine interview in 2021. “She’s only one of two kids in her grade who doesn’t have their own phone. So she’s been sneaking my iPad and creating TikTok videos without my permission. I know she thinks I’m being a tyrant, but I worry about the effect of social media on kids her age,” she said.
Adalaide
About three years after adopting Naleigh, Katherine and Josh adopted their second daughter Adalaide, 11, from the United States. She had revealed in the time between adopting Naleigh and Adalaide, it had become more difficult to adopt a child internationally, but she got the opportunity to adopt Adalaide from an American mother.
As the girls have gotten older, Katherine has explained that she’s very open with them about what they know about their biological parents. “They do have more questions as they get older. We have said to them, this is your story. We don’t have any information about your biological fathers, but we do have a bit about your biological mothers. If you guys want to talk more about them, you can have as much or as little information as you want. Tell us what you’re comfortable with knowing,” she told Parents.
Katherine has also shared that her middle child is very interested in horse-riding. “Thank God somebody on this whole horse ranch does. She’s my pistol,” she quipped. “She actually wants to start barrel racing [a rodeo event where horseback riders compete to weave through barrels at top speed]. And she loves to make Naleigh laugh.”
She’s also posted birthday tributes to her younger daughter. “My beautiful, fiery, witty girl turns 10 today,” she wrote in April 2022. “She made you work to make her laugh…still does. She has the most beautiful soulful eyes and when she trains them on you just know she’s taking it ALL in and yes…she’s judging you.”
Joshua
Katherine gave birth to her and Josh’s first and only biological child Joshua Bishop Kelley Jr., 7, in December 2016. She admitted that she wasn’t sure that she’d ever get pregnant in a 2017 interview with People. “It was a surprise! I knew I wanted to expand our family, I knew I wanted to have more children,” she said. “Only when I was about 35 did I start going, ‘Well, should we consider getting pregnant?’ You don’t want the choice to be taken away from you.”
When Joshua was 5, Katherine revealed that he was ” obsessed with Spider-Man and the Hulk” to Parents. She also admitted that she was happy to have a boy after two girls. ” I was so relieved. It was actually a big reason why I was vacillating between trying to get pregnant or adopting again, since with adoption you can specify the sex. I just thought, another girl could mean lifelong therapy for all of us,” she quipped.
Like her daughters, Joshua regularly makes appearances on her mom’s social media, whether it’s a post about his first day of school or a comical video of family moment.
