Katherine Ashley
Katherine is Mei鈥檚 adoptive mother, and Mei her only child.
She is American which allowed her and her husband Jim to be one of the first couples able to adopt from China when the process became legalized. An academic, Katherine is intelligent and forward thinking but also very comfortable with her quiet life in the English countryside.
Katherine and Mei have always been close and she has encouraged an interest in China, its culture and any discussion of finding her birth parents. But when faced with that reality now, Katherine fights hard to hide her biggest fear - that she may be usurped and lose her daughter forever.
Elizabeth Perkins
Elizabeth studied acting at Chicago's Goodman School of Drama at DePaul University for three years, then launched her professional career with a co-starring gig in the touring company of Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs. Seasoned, she returned to New York in the spring of 1984 to make her Broadway debut as a replacement in the Simon play.
After her bout with theater, she went on to star in her first major film role in the screen adaptation of David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," later turned into a Rob Lowe/Demi Moore star vehicle retitled About Last Night.... Perkins also appeared as the grown woman interested in Tom Hanks in Big and in 1991, starred with Kevin Bacon in He Said, She Said. She also portrayed Whilma in the classic, the Flintstones.
Perkins starred in the NBC comedy series Battery Park produced by Gary David Goldberg (who recently directed her in Must Love Dogs in a supporting role to Diane Lane), and HBO's If These Walls Could Talk 2. Most recently she starred opposite Mary Louise Parker on the series Weeds for Showtime.
