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Kelly Preston was once the epitome of beddability – the woman Hollywood called on to make men sit up in the cinema and think to themselves: “Now that’s more like it.” When Preston rose to fame in the mid-1980s, the Hawaii-born actress immediately became a living shorthand for desirable American womanhood – and in the decades that followed, the industry would consistently, and perhaps inevitably, fail to imagine her as anything but.
She played the kind of high-status sweethearts that suggested her male co-stars had done, were doing, or were about to do very nicely for themselves indeed. But what made her career so remarkable was something that ostensibly had nothing to do with work: her marriage to John Travolta in 1991, which seemed to bring her highly polished trophy-beauty persona down from the shelf and into the real world.
Preston soon became known as Travolta’s wife first and foremost, and her working life slowed as she raised their three children – the eldest of whom, Jett, would die of a seizure in 2009 at the age of 16. It was a bolt of unthinkable tragedy striking a life which, in Hollywood terms, had already reached its happy ending almost two decades beforehand.
Preston came to Los Angeles to study acting at the University of Southern California and took a string of bit-parts in television in the early 1980s, but it was that decade’s teen sex comedy boom that made her a star. In 1985, she played the smoking-hot conquest in two, Mischief and Secret Admirer, and the films’ settings were different enough – a Norman Rockwell-esque midwestern town versus uber-hip present-day Los Angeles – to suggest that Preston’s beauty and charm weren’t evocative of a particular time or place, but rather spoke to more fundamental American desires.
The camera in both films ogled her adoringly, though its gaze turned nasty the following year in John Frankenheimer’s 52 Pick-Up, a grim neo-noir in which Preston played a mistress who is caught on video in flagrante, and is later stripped and murdered on tape as part of a blackmail plot.
Her breakthrough role came two years after that, in the blockbuster comedy Twins: she played Marnie Mason, the love interest of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Julius, and for many late Gen-X and early millennial male cinema-goers, a scene in which she pliantly slunk around Arnie’s motel room in a sheer silk nightie was a formative moment.
It was around then that she met Travolta on the set of The Experts, a 1989 comedy in which the two share the kind of theatrically overblown dance floor sequence that was by then already a hallmark of her future husband’s career. The two had tangible chemistry, but it was the first and last film in which they would appear together until 2000’s Battlefield Earth – the Scientology-inspired, critically drubbed science-fiction epic that would become one of the most notorious all-time box-office bombs.
Preston would continue to pop up over the years alongside her husband in films that were scarcely better received than that one, including 2009’s mid-life crisis comedy Old Dogs and 2018’s gangster biopic Gotti. She made her final film last year: the as-yet-unreleased British comedy Off the Rails, in which she stars alongside Jenny Seagrove and Sally Phillips.
In this, at least, Preston does not appear to have been cast as someone else’s partner: the plot follows three women in their 50s retracing a much-cherished Interrail holiday from their student days. But even playing a love interest, or rather a soon-to-be-ex, she was able to hold her own against the most intensely charismatic movie star of our time. The star was Tom Cruise and the film was Jerry Maguire. Preston was Avery, Jerry’s go-getting and enviably gorgeous fiancée.
It was her most rounded character as well as her most thrillingly dynamic – the couple’s big break-up scene is a zappy, funny microcosm of too-good-to-be-true-ism, as Avery reels off various supposedly unlovely personality traits (“I don’t cry at movies! I don’t gush over babies! I don’t buy Christmas presents five months early!”) which paint her as something of a unicorn-like catch for the common-or-garden 1990s bloke.
Of course, Jerry ends up with his mousy secretary, played by Renée Zellweger, and the fiery Avery disappears into his past. But thanks to moments like these, Preston remains with us, even after her passing. Like so many of her characters, we were lucky to have encountered her when we did.
Kelly Preston was more than a male fantasy – 1990s Hollywood let her down
The actress, who has died aged 57, wasn't just John Travolta's wife and a sex icon. At her best on-screen, she was both brilliant and unique