American actress Kate Capshaw is best known for playing the character Willie Scott in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, who she later married.

Born Kathleen Sue Nail on November 3, 1953 in Fort Worth, Texas, USA, Capshaw moved to St. Louis, Missouri at the age of five. She graduated from Hazelwood Senior High in 1972 and later earned a degree in education from the University of Missouri. She was a Special Education teacher at Southern Boone County High School in Ashland, Missouri and Rock Bridge High School in Columbia, Missouri.

When Capshaw moved to New York to pursue her acting career, she landed her first role in the soap opera The Edge of Night. In 1984, she starred in Dreamscape. In the same year, she met Spielberg when she became the female lead for the Raiders of the Lost Ark prequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. After two years, she appeared as Andie Bergstrom, a camp instructor in the film SpaceCamp and starred as Susanna McKaskel in The Quick and the Dead with Sam Elliott a year after. She also co-starred in the spy film/romance Code Name Dancer.

Kate Capshaw was featured in several films from late 1980s through the 1990s. These included Black Rain, Just Cause, Private Affairs and The Love Letter. She was also featured in the 1997 film The Alarmist along with David Arquette and Stanley Tucci. In 2001, she starred in A Girl Thing, a miniseries in the Showtime Cable Network, with Elle Macpherson.