Kelly Preston

The Curse of the Perfect Blonde

Kelly Kamalelehua Smith was born in Honolulu, back when Hawaii wasn't yet the mass tourist destination it is today. Before turning twenty, she had already lived in Iraq and Australia. Her career didn't begin on a film set but in a TV commercial for a sanitary pad brand.

In 1985, she landed her first leading role in Daydream Believer. That's when she decided to change her last name to Preston (a purely commercial move suggested by her agent). That teen comedy quickly typecast her as the unattainable girl.

Preston knew her looks were a double-edged sword in 1980s Hollywood.

And the gamble paid off. In 1988, she appeared in Twins alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. The film grossed more than 216 million dollars worldwide. That gave her enough of a name to stop being just a pretty face in B-movies.

But the real change came with a character nobody wanted to like. In 1996, Cameron Crowe handed her the script for Jerry Maguire so she could play Avery Bishop. She was the competitive and aggressive fiancée of Tom Cruise (a role that demanded absolute coldness).

Avery Bishop's Ambition

In Jerry Maguire she broke away from her sweet image. Her breakup scene with Cruise in the restaurant has been studied for years in acting schools for its rhythm and its ruthlessness. It was the moment the industry realized Preston could carry the weight of a major production without blinking.

That same year, she worked on From Dusk Till Dawn under the direction of Robert Rodriguez. She needed only a few minutes on screen as a news anchor to prove that her presence filled the frame. Because Preston didn't need grand monologues for audiences to remember her face as they left the theater.

In 1991, she married John Travolta in a ceremony in Paris that had to be repeated days later in Florida due to legal issues. Her private life began taking up more space in magazines than her professional projects. But she kept working at a steady pace on titles such as Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken from 1999.

Preston never sought the approval of intellectual critics.

In 2003, she appeared in What a Girl Wants, and in 2005 in Sky High. She was comfortable in family films and light comedies. Her career choices favored financial stability and a balance with her personal life over glory at European film festivals.

Silence and Farewell

Family tragedy struck her career in 2009 with the death of her son Jett. Preston stepped away from the spotlight for a long time to take refuge in her family and her religious beliefs. She returned to film in 2010 with The Last Song (the movie in which she shared the cast with a young Miley Cyrus).

In 2018, she shot Gotti alongside her husband. It was one of her most personal projects, since she played Victoria Gotti (the wife of the famous New York mobster). The film was a box-office disaster and received savage reviews, but she defended the project to the end.

Nobody knew that during that shoot she was already fighting breast cancer.

She chose to keep her illness completely private for two years. There were no press releases or hospital photos. Her last film appearance was in Off the Rails, which was shot in 2019. In this British production, she played a woman who travels by train across Europe with her friends to fulfill the last wish of a friend who has passed away.

Kelly Preston died on July 12, 2020, at the age of 57, at her home in Clearwater. The film Off the Rails was released posthumously in July 2021 in cinemas in the United Kingdom and Ireland.