Katherine Heigl explains why she left Hollywood to move to Utah
Katherine Heigl has explained why she left Los Angeles and moved her family to Utah.
The 44-year-old star and husband Josh Kelley have three children - daughters Naleigh, 14, and 10-year-old Adelaide, and son Joshua, six.
Heigl, who played Dr Izzie Stevens in Grey's Anatomy from 2005 to 2010, spent two decades living in LA while she made a name for herself in Hollywood.
Advert
And the move paid off, with Heigl carving a very successful career - however, in a recent interview she revealed why she decided to move from her LA base to Utah to raise her family.
Speaking to E! News, she said: “I didn't know how to raise them in LA.
"So I felt like I could do it here. I could be more on top of things that scare me and I could be more on top of the kinds of friends they have and places they're going, the kind of activities they're involved in - and what the hell they're doing on their phones!"
The family now live in a ranch in outside Park City, which they share with eight dogs, three cats, chickens, goats, horses and assorted other animals.
Talking about life on the ranch, she added: "I could kind of decompress and let that hustle part of me go - a little bit.
"I don't know that in any career you can ever completely stop hustling, but being able to separate it a little bit and choose those times of hustle versus just being in it constantly was really important to me."
Heigl explained that as her children are a little older now when she goes on location to shoot they stay at home.
"I can't easily anymore take them out of school systems and put them into whole new cities and environments," she said.
"I had to live with that aspect of what I do for work, I have to leave my family… I call the kids probably two, three nights a week.
"I'm not FaceTiming every day - I'm at work, having crap cell service or terrible Wi-Fi. You have to be able to let it go."
But when she’s back at home, Heigl says she’s ‘hyper-focused on family life’.
She continued: "My manager, my agent, my lawyer, they're all like, 'Hey, you should probably read that script we sent you two weeks ago...'
“I'm like, 'Right, right, right, right...' I just hyper-focus on the world I'm in now."
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV
Claire Reid