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F O U R T E E N " A D U L T T R U T H S " BEFORE I HAD MAX, I MADE FILMS ABOUT KIDS; NOW THAT I HAVE ONE, I'LL PROBABLY START MAKING FILMS ABOUT ADULTS. — S T E V E N S P I E L B E R G , 1 9 8 5 E S C R I B I N G t h e kind of woman he liked to cast in his movies, Spielberg once said, "Maybe I've been searching for the ultimate shiksa. "* He found her when Kate Capshaw walked into his office to read for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He was captivated with Kate's finely sculpted model's features, lissome figure, and midwestern emotional bluntness. She resembled a corn-fed, all-American, more innocent-seeming version ofJulie Christie. Though not a natural blonde, Kate was willing to dye her brown tresses to conform to Spielberg's fantasy image of a shiksa heroine. Sending her audition tape to Temple of Doom screenwriters Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, he said, "I really liked this girl Kate. Could you say something good about her to George?" Spielberg may not have recognized the element of calculation behind his future wife's wholesome facade. "I read an article [about him] when E.T. came out," she recalled in 1996. "I knew that I had a love connection." When she went for her audition, she "wasn't that interested in getting the job. I still * In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten defines a shiksa as "A non-Jewish woman, especially a young one. . . . Pronounced sniK-seb, to rhyme with 'pick the.' " D 3 6 0 S T E V E N $ P I E L B E R G had those young notions of being an artist, doing only the sorts of movies that Meryl Streep would do. I couldn't imagine her doing a sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark." As a result, she concentrated her entire attention on Spielberg himself. Entering his office at Warner Bros., she was told to sit facing him, but sidled alongside and turned on the charm. "The minute I met him," she recalled, "I sensed he was a sweet, shy guy who was kind of wondering, 'How did I get here?' I love that in men, that shyness and humility." She was careful not to gush over his movies, as most young actresses would have done in that situation. As she left, he told her, 'Thanks for not saying anything about E.T."On their next meeting, he offered an unmistakable sign of his affection, inviting her to play a video game. Kate had "an immediate, full-throttle reaction" to meeting Spielberg. "I went home and I said, 'I think I'm in really big trouble here.' " Although she has not disguised the fact that she campaigned fiercely to marry him, Capshaw portrayed her romantic attraction to Spielberg as instinctive, if somewhat maternal: "What attracted me was the way he smelled. Like babies when they are born, like he was mine. They say if you blindfold a mom and present her with twenty babies, she'll be able to pick hers out because of the smell. It was likethat." B O R N Kathy Sue Nail in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1953, Kate Capshaw was raised in the St. Louis suburb of Florissant, the daughter of a beautician and an airline operations manager. Her family was Methodist, middle-class, and Middle-American to its core. "My parents were the first generation to leave the farm," she said in 1984. "I looked very WASPy, but I wanted to look ethnic. I wanted to be a Jewish intellectual. I also wanted to be an actress, but I didn't know to study to be one. 'What can I do in Missouri?' I asked myself. . . . Teaching was a very socially acceptable, respectable position, so I became a teacher." Earning a master's degree in learning disabilities at the University of Missouri, she spent two years teaching in a rural Missouri school district but was "not really very happy with what I was doing. It was what everyone else thought I should do, not what /thought I should do." Kate married her college sweetheart, Robert Capshaw, who became a high school principal. They had a daughter, Jessica, in 1977. Bob accompanied Kate to New York so she could pursue her dream of becoming a professional...

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