Kate Austen

Katherine Anne "Kate" Austen is a fictional character on the ABC television series Lost, played by Canadian actress Evangeline Lilly. She is the de facto female lead. In the original plot, in which Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) dies when the group finds the cockpit, Kate was to emerge as the leader for the survivors, motivating them to build shelter and begin considering life as permanent residents of the island. In the original description for Kate, she was a slightly older woman separated from her husband, who went to the bathroom in the tail-section of the plane. However, that idea ended up being used for Rose Henderson (L. Scott Caldwell) and her husband Bernard Nadler (Sam Anderson). Yunjin Kim originally tried out for Kate. The producers liked her but didn't think she was right for the part, so they wrote the role of Sun-Hwa Kwon for her.