Kelly McGillis

Kelly Ann McGillis, born July 9, 1957, in Newport Beach, California, is an American actress whose career has spanned film, television, and stage. The eldest of three daughters born to Virginia Joan McGillis, a homemaker, and Donald Manson McGillis, a physician, she grew up in the Southern California suburb before pursuing a career in the performing arts. Her paternal ancestry is Scots-Irish, with German and Welsh roots. After leaving Newport Harbor High School in 1975, she earned her GED and relocated to New York City, where she trained at the Juilliard School, graduating in 1983 as part of Group 12. While at Juilliard she performed in William Congreve's Love for Love, directed by John Bletchley, and married fellow student Boyd Black in 1979, though the couple divorced in 1981.

McGillis made her film debut in Reuben, Reuben in 1983. Her breakthrough came two years later with Witness, in which she played Rachel Lapp, an Amish mother, earning both Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations. In 1986 she appeared opposite Tom Cruise in Top Gun as flight instructor Charlotte Blackwood, known by the call sign Charlie. Her subsequent film work in 1988 included The House on Carroll Street, in which she played a caretaker for a character portrayed by Jessica Tandy, and The Accused, in which she played attorney Katheryn Murphy. She later cited her experience as a rape survivor — having been attacked at knifepoint in her Manhattan apartment in 1982 — as a reason for choosing the prosecutor role rather than the victim role in that film. She discussed the assault publicly in a 1988 People magazine interview, describing its lasting psychological effects. In 1992 she portrayed Claire Merritt Ruth, Babe Ruth's second wife, in The Babe, and in 1999 she co-starred with Val Kilmer in At First Sight. Her 2000 film The Monkey's Mask, based on a verse novel by Australian poet Dorothy Porter, starred Susie Porter and became an international cult film.

McGillis's early television work included a role on the daytime soap One Life to Live in 1984 and the television movie Sweet Revenge with Alec Baldwin that same year. She narrated the PBS documentary Out of Ireland in 1995 and joined the cast of Showtime's The L Word for its fifth season in 2007. Her later screen work included the vampire film Stake Land, directed by Jim Mickle, in 2010; Ti West's thriller The Innkeepers in 2011; and We Are What We Are in 2013. Love Finds You in Sugarcreek, Ohio marked her third Amish-themed film role, and An Uncommon Grace on Hallmark Channel was her fourth. She held the lead role of Rose Lewis in Mother of All Secrets in 2017.

McGillis's stage career has been extensive. Her credits include Don Juan in 1982, The Sea Gull and Peccadillo in 1985, The Merchant of Venice in 1988, Twelfth Night in 1989, Mary Stuart and The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1990, and Mourning Becomes Electra in 1997, among others. From the late 1980s through the mid-2000s she was a featured actress at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where she appeared in a 2002 production of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Her Broadway appearances spanned 1994 to 2003 and included Hedda Gabler and The Graduate. She also performed in a touring production of The Graduate in 2004, playing Mrs. Robinson. In 2009 she appeared in a Pasadena Playhouse production of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes alongside Julia Duffy, and in 2010 she toured the United Kingdom in Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. As of 2013, she has taught acting at the New York Studio for Stage and Screen in Asheville, North Carolina.

In her personal life, McGillis married Fred Tillman in 1989, and the couple have two daughters. They divorced in 2002. In April 1996, a 110-foot schooner valued at $1.5 million, owned by McGillis and Tillman, was destroyed by fire at a marina in Dania, Florida, after a fire on an adjacent boat spread to the vessel. McGillis came out as a lesbian in a 2009 interview with SheWired and entered into a civil union with Melanie Leis, a Philadelphia sales executive, in 2010. The two had first met in 2000 when Leis worked as a bartender at a Key West establishment McGillis co-owned with Tillman. McGillis also worked full-time with drug addicts and alcoholics at Seabrook House Drug Alcohol Rehab Center in Bridgeton, New Jersey, during a period when she and Leis shared a home in Collingswood. On June 17, 2016, she was assaulted during a home invasion at her residence; the intruder, Laurence Marie Dorn, was subsequently convicted of misdemeanor breaking and entering and sentenced to probation. McGillis has resided in Hendersonville, North Carolina.