McGillis was born on July 9, 1957, in the Southern California suburb of Newport Beach, the eldest of three daughters born to Virginia Joan (née Snell), a homemaker, and Donald Manson McGillis, a physician.[5] Her direct paternal descent is Scots-Irish, including German and Welsh ancestry.[6] She attended Newport Harbor High School.[7]
After making her film debut in Reuben, Reuben[11] in 1983, McGillis's breakout role was that of an Amish mother in Witness (1985) for which she received Golden Globe and BAFTA award nominations. Her next high-profile role was that of flight instructor Charlotte Blackwood (call sign "Charlie") in the 1986 fighter-pilot film Top Gun starring Tom Cruise.[12]
McGillis played the part of caretaker for Miss Venable (Jessica Tandy) in 1988's The House on Carroll Street, which also starred Jeff Daniels. She overhears a suspicious conversation in the house next door and suspects that she's stumbled on a conspiracy to smuggle Nazi war criminals into the United States.
After 1988's The Accused, she appeared in Cat Chaser with Peter Weller, a film she despised and which discouraged her from pursuing an acting career.[14][15] McGillis appeared in dozens of television and film roles throughout the 1990s before taking a break from acting for a few years.
McGillis played the part of Babe Ruth's second wife, Claire Merritt Ruth, in The Babe (1992). From the late-1980s to the mid-1990s, McGillis appeared in Winter People (1989), and North (1994), her second Amish part in television or film, as well as several made-for-TV films.
In 1999, McGillis co-starred with Val Kilmer (who plays Virgil, a blind man), for a second time as his over protective sister in At First Sight.[16]
She starred in the 1984 television movie Sweet Revenge (also known as Bittersweet Revenge) with Alec Baldwin.[18]
Other television films during the 1980s included Private Sessions in 1985, and as a narrator in Santabear's First Christmas. She also narrated the documentary Out of Ireland for PBS in 1995.
During the late-1980s[19] and through the mid-2000s, McGillis was a featured actress at the prestigious Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC.[20] In 2002, she appeared in production of John Webber's play "The Duchess of Malfi" at the Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, DC.
McGillis married fellow Juilliard student Boyd Black in 1979; the couple divorced in 1981.[34] In the mid-1980s, she dated actors Warren Beatty and Jodie Foster.[35][36] She married Fred Tillman in 1989, and they have two daughters.[37] The couple divorced in 2002.
The Centurion, a 110-foot schooner valued at $1.5 million owned by McGillis and her then-husband, Fred Tillman, was destroyed by fire in April 1996 at a marina in Dania, Florida. The fire started on an adjacent boat at the Port LauDania marina on a Dania Cutoff Canal and spread to the schooner. Tillman had brought the boat from the couple's home in Key West in hopes of selling it at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show.[38]
McGillis came out as a lesbian in 2009 during an interview with SheWired.[39][40] In 2010, she entered into a civil union with Melanie Leis, a Philadelphia sales executive. They had met in 2000 when Leis was a bartender at the Caribbean Bar Grill & Brewery[41] in Key West, Florida,[42] which McGillis owned with her then-husband.[43]
McGillis worked full-time with drug addicts and alcoholics at Seabrook House Drug Alcohol Rehab Center, a rehabilitation center in Bridgeton, New Jersey, when she and Leis shared a home in Collingswood.[44]
McGillis was left scratched and bruised after she was assaulted by a woman who broke into her home on June 17, 2016.[46] She said the attack, as well as others which she has been a victim of in the past, led her to apply for a concealed carry permit to protect herself. Following the incident, a 38-year-old woman, Laurence Marie Dorn, was charged with second-degree burglary, misdemeanor larceny, misdemeanor stalking, assault and battery, and interfering with emergency communication.[46] Later, Dorn was convicted of misdemeanor breaking and entering and sentenced to probation.[47]
^Mottram, James (February 21, 2014). "Kelly McGillis: 'I would cameo in Top Gun 2'". The Independent. Archived from the original on July 27, 2016. Retrieved July 12, 2016. McGillis moved to New York in 1979 to study acting at the prestigious Juilliard drama school, the same year she married fellow student Boyd Black. It was short-lived, the couple divorcing in 1981
^Schwartz, Paula (September 15, 2010). "Kelly McGillis, Melanie Leis". The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 6, 2017. Retrieved September 29, 2018.
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