Isabel Gillies

Isabel Gillies (born February 9, 1970, in New York City, New York) is an actress and author. She played Elliot Stabler's wife, Kathy, in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Her memoir, "Happens Every Day," was a New York Times bestseller, and her most recent book is the young adult novel Starry Night.

Gillies landed her first movie role when Whit Stillman cast her as Cynthia McLean in his pioneering independent film, Metropolitan (1990). Other film credits include Finley in "Another Girl Another Planet" (1992), Alison in I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), Moira Ingalls in On Line (2002), Isabel in Happy Here and Now (2002), and Kathryn in New Orleans, Mon Amour (2008).

Prior to her role as Kathy Stabler on SVU, which she played from 1999 to 2011, Gillies appeared in "Bad Girl," an episode of the original Law & Order series, playing a young woman who murders an undercover police officer and then undergoes a religious conversion during her trial and is born again. In 2000, she played the role of Alison in the short-lived Fox series, The $treet.

Gillies' 2009 memoir, Happens Every Day, is about her leaving New York City to follow her first husband to Oberlin College, only to see her marriage suddenly crumble. Happens Every Day was a New York Times bestseller and featured by Starbucks as a nationwide selection for its book program. NPR's Fresh Air selected it as a Top Ten Book of 2009. Her follow-up memoir, A Year and Six Seconds, was published in 2011. Her most recent book, a young adult novel, Starry Night, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September 2014.

Gillies grew up in New York City. She attended the Brearley School until age sixteen. She then attended the Nightingale-Bamford Schooll from eleventh grade until her graduation. Gillies struggled with severe dyslexia all throughout school. She is the daughter of Linda and Archibald Gillies. She graduated from New York University with a BFA in Film. She went to Rhode Island School of Design as a freshman before dropping out to film Metropolitan, and then finished college at NYU.

She was married to DeSales Harrison, an English professor at Oberlin College, from 1999 to 2005.

Gillies married Peter Lattman, an editor at The New York Times, on October 13, 2007.