Woman Crush Wednesday: Kate Walsh Takes ‘The Umbrella Academy’ By Storm

Time sure flies when you’re spending half of it washing your hands! Whether we’re ready or not, August has come, and with it, the first Woman Crush Wednesday of this brand new month. New movies and shows continue to pop onto the scene, and with them, talented actresses who deliver memorable performances that make the shows we love into what they are. Today we’re celebrating one of those wonderful women, a successful actress, producer, and businesswoman who has delivered one fantastic performance after another in both film and television throughout the past two decades. So, without further ado, give it up for this week’s WCW, the incredible Kate Walsh!

WHO’S THAT GAL: Kate Walsh

WHY WE’RE CRUSHING: Walsh makes a surprise return as The Handler in season two of Netflix Original superhero series, The Umbrella Academy, which premiered on the platform on Friday, July 31st. The show’s sophomore season picks up right after the events of its predecessor left off, with our Hargreeves siblings transported back in time to 1960s Dallas, Texas after the Earth was destroyed in their own original timeline twenty years in the future. While they deal with the fallout of their own timeline-disrupting activities in the form of a nuclear catastrophe, Walsh’s The Handler is back after seemingly dying at the end of season one, and she’s dealing with her own struggles after being demoted from her position and attempting to claw her way back into power with only the help of her adopted daughter, Lila (Ritu Arya).

The show’s second season has already received positive buzz, such as a recent review from Vox, which wrote that the show’s “second season manages to balance both humanity and superheroics without sacrificing either,” plus an article by Variety delving into and praising Walsh’s character’s “colorful and often grand looks for the season,” and many more. Walsh’s return to The Umbrella Academy‘s second season helps to take the show to the next level, so make sure you do yourself a favor and check her great work out!

WHERE YOU’VE SEEN HER BEFORE: Walsh’s impressive professional on-screen career began in 1996 when she had both her film and television debuts in crime drama film Normal Life and in an episode of NBC police procedural Homicide: Life on the Street. From there, Walsh held numerous roles that encompassed a vast array of genres on screens big and small. On television, she has guest or recurring roles in Law & Order, The Drew Carey Show, The Norm Show, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation between 1997 and 2004 before landing the role for which she is best known, as Dr. Addison Montgomery in hit ABC medical drama series Grey’s Anatomy, which she held from 2005 to 2012, and then reprising her role as Dr. Montgomery from 2007 to 2013 in her character’s spin-off series, Private Practice. Over the following years, Walsh went on to have guest, recurring, or main roles in other well-known shows, such as animated sitcom King of the Hill, dark comedy-crime anthology series Fargo, legal sitcom Bad Judge (for which she was also the executive producer on nine episodes), and teen drama 13 Reasons Why before beginning her role in The Umbrella Academy last year.

Walsh has also has accrued quite the impressive credit list in films, too, most notably 2000 romantic comedy-drama The Family Man, 2005 sports comedy Kicking & Screaming, 2010 action-horror Legion, 2012 coming-of-age drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 2013 horror parody Scary Movie 5, 2017 comedy Girls Trip, 2018 comedy-drama Ideal Home, and 2019 sci-fi film 3022, you know, just to name a few (and this is leaving out practically half of the great titles she’s been in for both film and television! Talk about a hard worker! We bow down). Clearly, there’s no shortage of great work coming out of Walsh, and we can expect more from her for a long time coming.

WHERE YOU’LL SEE HER AGAIN: Luckily, you don’t have to wait too long to see more of Walsh, as unsurprisingly, she’s got plenty of irons in the fire for both film and television (seriously, when does she have time to sleep?!). One of those projects is indie drama film Sometime Other Than Now, which revolves around Sam (Donald Logue), who after his motorcycle is damaged in an apparent crash into the ocean becomes stranded in a small New England town, where he finds refuge at a run-down motel looked after by Kate (Walsh), a similarly burnt-out, lost soul. The mystery around Sam’s presence in town unravels when it’s discovered his estranged daughter, Audrey (Trieste Dunn), lives there, and he hasn’t seen her in 25 years. As he tries to bridge the gap between the little girl he left long ago and the woman who grew up without her father, Sam learns he was never cut-out to be emotionally connected to anyone – unless he falls in love with another soul just as lonesome.

The second of Walsh’s three upcoming projects is action crime drama Honest Thief, which is set to come out this October, and tells the story of the “In-and-Out Bandit,” AKA meticulous thief Tom Carter (Liam Neeson, who has stolen $9 million from small-town banks while managing to keep his identity a secret. But after he falls in love with the bubbly Annie  Kate Walsh), Tom decides to make a fresh start by coming clean about his criminal past, only to be double-crossed by two ruthless FBI agents.

Walsh’s third upcoming project is a lead role in 10-episode comedy-drama series Emily in Paris, in which a young American woman from the Midwest (Lily Collins) is hired by a marketing firm in Paris to provide them with an American perspective on things. We can expect to see the release of the show before the end of this year.

For even more from Walsh, you can keep up with her on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Check her out!

Watch The Umbrella Academy on Netflix