Where Is Phoebe Cates Now?

By CelebPaid Editorial Team · 9 min read

Phoebe Cates at the 81st Academy Awards. The Gremlins star retired from acting and has run the Blue Tree boutique in New York since 2005.Photo: Greg in Hollywood (Greg Hernandez), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Rise: From Teen Model to Fast Times

Phoebe Belle Cates was born on July 16, 1963, in New York City, into a family that already lived and breathed show business. Her father, Joseph Cates, was a Broadway and television producer, and her uncle Gilbert Cates was a film and television director who would later become president of the Directors Guild of America. Growing up around studios and stages, she was a natural fit for the camera, and she began working as a teen model while still in school, appearing in magazines that introduced her striking, all-American look to the country before she ever spoke a line on film.

Her acting debut came in 1982 with the South Pacific drama Paradise, but it was her second film that same year that made her immortal. As Linda Barrett in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the Amy Heckerling-directed teen comedy that captured a generation, Cates delivered what became one of the most famous scenes of the 1980s: emerging from a swimming pool in a red bikini while "Moving in Stereo" played. Rolling Stone later called it the most memorable bikini-drop in cinema history. She followed it with Private School in 1983, and by the time she was 20, she was one of the most recognizable young actresses in America.

Gremlins and the Making of an 80s Icon

In 1984 Cates took the role that would define her mainstream career: Kate Beringer, the bank teller who falls for Billy Peltzer in Gremlins, the Joe Dante-directed, Steven Spielberg-produced horror-comedy that became one of the biggest hits of the year. The film's blend of scares, comedy, and Christmas-season chaos made it a phenomenon, and Cates's warm, grounded performance gave the movie its emotional center. That same year she headlined the television miniseries Lace, proving she could carry a prestige production as well as a blockbuster. She spent the rest of the decade working steadily: Bright Lights, Big City (1988) opposite Michael J. Fox, the ensemble period comedy Shag (1988), and a return to the Gremlins universe with Gremlins 2: The New Batch in 1990.

In 1991 she starred in Drop Dead Fred, the dark fantasy-comedy in which she played Elizabeth, a put-upon young woman whose childhood imaginary friend returns to wreck her adult life. The film was savaged by critics on release but has since become a genuine cult classic, with fans embracing its strange, sincere heart. She followed it with Princess Caraboo in 1994, a period comedy based on the true story of a 19th-century impostor. It would be one of her last major film roles. Cates never chased the kind of career momentum that defined her Brat Pack-era peers; she worked when the part interested her, and by the mid-1990s, something else had become more interesting than any script.

The Marriage That Lasted: Kevin Kline Since 1989

In 1989, at the height of her fame, Cates married actor Kevin Kline, the Oscar-winning star of A Fish Called Wanda, Sophie's Choice, and The Big Chill. The wedding, on March 5, 1989, came just as her career was peaking, and the couple made a decision that would define the rest of their lives: family would come first. Kline has said the two agreed to alternate their work schedules so that one parent could always stay home with the children, a pact that kept them anchored through decades when most Hollywood marriages collapsed.

The strategy worked. As of 2026, Cates and Kline have been married for 37 years, an eternity by Hollywood standards, and they did it without tabloid drama, public feuds, or even much publicity at all. Kline kept acting steadily through the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, winning a Tony Award in 2017 for Present Laughter and voicing Calvin Fischoeder on Bob's Burgers, while Cates quietly receded from the screen. Friends of the couple describe a marriage built on genuine friendship and a shared refusal to let fame dictate their choices.

The Kids: Owen and Greta

The couple's two children grew up in New York, largely shielded from the spotlight their parents had once courted. Owen Kline was born in October 1991 and got an early taste of the family business with a role in Noah Baumbach's critically acclaimed The Squid and the Whale in 2005, playing one of the two sons in a divorcing Brooklyn family. But rather than pursue acting, Owen moved behind the camera, becoming a filmmaker in his own right.

Greta Kline, born in March 1994, chose music. Performing as Frankie Cosmos, she became one of indie-pop's most beloved singer-songwriters, building a devoted following with lo-fi, emotionally precise songs. Her debut album, Zentropy, celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2024, a milestone that made her parents' friends feel very old. Both children have pursued creative careers while keeping their personal lives largely out of the public eye, a discipline they clearly learned at home. For Cates, raising them was the job that mattered most, and by every account she did it well.

Blue Tree: Life as a Madison Avenue Shopkeeper

In 2005, Cates opened the second act of her public life: Blue Tree, an independent boutique on Madison Avenue in Manhattan's Carnegie Hill neighborhood. The shop sells an eclectic mix of women's clothing and jewelry alongside home goods, gifts, fragrance, music, and delicacies, all curated by Cates herself. The New York Times described it as "a version of Elizabeth Street for the Carnegie Hill crowd, a little oasis of downtown aesthetic at Ladies Who Lunch prices," capturing the store's charm: bohemian taste at Upper East Side rents.

Cates has said she always wanted to have a general store, and Blue Tree is exactly that, a cabinet of curiosities assembled with an artist's eye. She works in the shop herself, and customers occasionally tell her she looks like Phoebe Cates, to which she reportedly replies, "I get that a lot." More than two decades after opening, the boutique remains a beloved neighborhood institution, proof that its owner understood something Hollywood never quite did: that a well-chosen life beats a well-managed career.

Blue Tree has also become something of a quiet pilgrimage site for fans of 1980s cinema, though the owner treats that attention with characteristic dry humor. Unlike celebrities who monetize nostalgia with autograph signings and convention circuits, Cates has never sold her past at the shop: there are no signed Gremlins posters on the walls, no Fast Times memorabilia in the window. The store's reputation rests entirely on its taste, and its clientele includes Upper East Side regulars who may or may not know that the woman ringing up their purchase once carried a summer blockbuster. That deliberate separation between past and present is, in its own way, the whole point of the place.

Why She Left Acting for Good

Cates never formally announced a retirement; she simply stopped taking roles. After Princess Caraboo in 1994, her screen work thinned to almost nothing. In 2001 she made a brief return in The Anniversary Party, appearing alongside her husband and her best friend Jennifer Jason Leigh, who co-directed the film, as a personal favor rather than a comeback. Her final acting credit, according to IMDb, was voice work for the video game Lego Dimensions in 2015. She has given almost no interviews in the decades since, and she keeps no public social media presence.

Her withdrawal from the screen was so complete that younger audiences sometimes encounter her films without knowing she is still alive, a phenomenon that has produced periodic false death rumors online, all of them baseless. Cates is alive and well in New York, simply uninterested in being famous. On the rare occasions photographers have caught her, she has been gracious but clear about her boundaries, and unlike other retired stars she has never used a rare sighting as the prelude to a comeback announcement.

Every few years, the rumor mill stirs. Warner Bros. has Gremlins 3 planned for November 2027, and fans immediately began speculating that Cates might return as Kate Beringer. The studio has not announced her as part of the cast, and all reports of her involvement remain pure speculation. There is no comeback tour, no memoir, no convention circuit. Cates walked away from Hollywood in the 1990s and never looked back, which may be the most radical thing any 1980s icon ever did.

Her Legacy

Phoebe Cates belongs to a rare category in Hollywood: the star who had everything the industry offers and decided she wanted something else. Her performances in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Gremlins are permanent fixtures of 1980s pop culture, the pool scene and the Christmas-monster chaos still quoted and rewatched by new generations. But her greater legacy may be the example she set by leaving. In an industry that treats visibility as oxygen, she proved that a meaningful life after fame is not only possible but preferable, at least for her.

Running a beloved shop on Madison Avenue, married for 37 years to one of America's finest actors, mother to two accomplished creative adults, Cates got the third act she actually wanted. She did not fade; she chose. And in choosing, she became something rarer than a movie star: a person who figured out what enough looks like, and then lived it, quietly, in New York City, far from the cameras that once followed her everywhere.

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