Kathleen Wilhoite graduated high school and enrolled in the USC Drama School. Within two months, she landed her first movie role. Throughout the 1980s, she appeared in a number of film and TV projects as both leads and second leads where her brash sexuality and unconventional style was eagerly put on display.
Most noticeably, she played opposite Charles Bronson in Murphy’s Law, Jane Fonda in The Morning After, Robert De Niro in Angel Heart, Amy Irving in Crossing Delancey, Patrick Swayze in Road House, Debra Winger and Nick Nolte in Everybody Wins, and again with Nolte and with Susan Sarandon in Lorenzo’s Oil, as well as Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in The Edge.
While her acting career flourished, she continued to expand her musical skills: a contract with Polygram Records, which inspired a brief sojourn to Texas, then to Nashville, flying back and forth to New York and Los Angeles to maintain her acting career, during which she was fortunate to play a variety of offbeat roles in such movies as Nurse Betty staring Renee Zellweger and Pay It Forward staring Helen Hunt. Then she signed with V2 Records based out of New York, but kept her name active on the credits list for over two decades.
Eventually, she moved back to Los Angeles and landed a number of challenging roles on such shows as L.A. Law, ER, Gilmore Girls, and more recently, CSI: Las Vegas, Yellowstone, and The Resident, portraying a wide variety of characters -- from drugged-out moms to mentally-challenged crime victims to grieving widows, cantankerous neighbors, child psychologists, alcoholics, car mechanics, farmers, sufferers of many catastrophic diseases, including a woman with a brain-eating amoeba who meets her demise by getting hit by an ambulance.
In the late 1980s, Kathleen was chosen by cartoonist Cathy Guisewite to give vocal life to her Cathy creation on animated TV. In the 1990’s, she played the title role in the animated series Pepper Ann. Currently, she appears as Sue Peltzer in Summer Camp Island, created by Julia Pott for Cartoon Network and HBO Max.
Married to record producer/drummer/marketing executive David Harte and the mother of three grown children, Kathleen has released and toured behind two CD’s - “Pitch Like a Girl” and “Shiva.” In sync with both her edgy acting and music style, she wrote and performed an autobiographical one-woman show, Stop Yellin’, directed by Kathy Najimy.
Her teaching career began at Columbia College Hollywood. She directed their main stage production that year, Moonchildren, then went and got her master’s degree in Theater Arts Pedagogy. After that, she taught Acting and Preparing for the Profession at CSULB for five years, Acting for the Camera and Auditioning at CalArts for three years, and then had a full time professorship at Savannah College of Art and Design where she taught acting, auditioning, and on-camera classes in comedy and commercials.
But Southern California has always been her home, so she came back and was overjoyed to have the opportunity to return to CalArts again. She spends most of her free time writing plays, novels, and screenplays. She has a humorous piece in Andrea Buchanan’s book Live and Let Love published by Gallery Books, a division of Simon and Shuster, and is currently converting Clown Baby, a play she wrote, into a feature film that she plans to co-direct, Covid-permitting, in the near future.
