After starting out with romantic-interest characters, Preston evolved into a smart, subversive performer – most notably in the hit romcom Jerry Maguire
In some ways, Kelly Preston’s most famous role was the one outside the movies: as John Travolta’s wife. They married in 1991 and became probably the most devotedly uxorious
Hollywood couple since Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. Preston and Travolta have a great sexy-funny dance routine together in the 1989
comedy The Experts, which is how they met. Preston put her acting career on hold for some of the 90s while she and Travolta started a family: having two sons, Jett and Benjamin, and a daughter, Ella. Heart-rendingly, Jett died of a seizure at the age of 16, a memory that adds a new layer of sadness to today’s news, and a new layer of sombre reflection about the great pressures that a woman in public life is expected to undergo.
In her 20s, Preston got sexy supporting-cast Hollywood roles in movies such as the 1988 box-office smash Twins, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as the bizarrely un-similar titular siblings. Preston played Marnie, the woman who marries Schwarzenegger’s gentle giant while Chloe Webb played her twin sister Linda, who is paired off with wisecracking DeVito. It is a measure of the sexist stereotyping of Hollywood that while the men are supposed to be hilariously different, she and Webb are the non-twins playing regular twins with 80s big hair, basically indistinguishable not just from each other but all the other “sexy” roles that Hollywood compels its female stars to fit into. Two years earlier, she had been in a quintessentially 80s teen comedy Mischief – the kind of movie which lived endlessly on in VHS rental outlets throughout the world – playing the hot blonde fantasy object of the shy adolescent boy.