Kelly Preston
Actress
THE HOLLYWOOD actress Kelly Preston, who has died at 57, appeared in more than 60 film and TV productions, often in romantic roles and sometimes with her husband, John Travolta.
But it was for her appearance opposite another leading man, as the disgruntled fiancée of Tom Cruise in the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire, that she is perhaps best remembered.
The 1988 comedy Twins , in which she was the love interest of Arnold Schwarzenegger, was a further breakout role.
It was in that year that she met Travolta, on the set of another comedy, The Experts. Both practicing Scientologists, they married in Paris in 1991 and she had a cameo in his unsuccessful science fiction romp, Battlefield Earth. Later they had equal billing in Gotti , in which Travolta played the mafia boss John Gotti and Ms Preston his wife, Victoria.
Preston was born Kelly Kamalelehua Smith in Hawaii. Her father, an agricultural worker, drowned when she was three, and her mother remarried.
As a child, she spent time in Iraq and Australia, where as a teenager a fashion photographer helped her get modelling work. Returning to the US, she studied drama and theatre at the University of Southern California.
Her first notable film roles – after TV exposure in such series as Chips and Quincy ME
– came in the mid-1980s in a succession of teen-oriented romantic comedies. But it was not long before she graduated to Hollywood’s front rank, and her appearance in Jerry Maguire was followed by pairings with Kevin Costner and Eddie Murphy in For Love of the Game and Holy Man, respectively,
Ms Preston’s first marriage in 1985, to the actor Kevin Gage, ended in divorce after two years, and she was briefly engaged to another actor, Charlie Sheen.
She is survived by Travolta and their children, Ella Bleu and Benjamin. Their eldest son, Jett, died in 2009 at 16, having had a seizure.