She became a megastar with her role as a flight instructor who falls in love with Tom Cruise in Top Gun. However, she did not appear in the sequel, which came out more than 30 years later. So what happened to actress Kelly McGillis?
Warning: Some aspects of this story may be disturbing.
Before Top Gun
Growing up in Newport Beach, California, Kelly McGillis, now 64, didn’t really think about danger. Two years after moving to New York to study acting at the prestigious Juilliard School, she was robbed at gunpoint, but even then she viewed it as an initiation ceremony in the Big Apple rather than fear.
But that changed in 1982. In February, she was at home when two men broke into her apartment and raped her at knifepoint.
Read more: Top Gun cast then and now
“I’ll never forget the way they smelled,” she told People magazine in 1988. “Like alcohol and old sweat… While one of them watched, the bigger one got on top of me and put the knife to my right eye… Then the other one got on top of me. They kept switching and told me they were going to beat me until I was dead.”
Luckily, someone heard their screams and called the police, who pounded on the door and forced the attackers to flee. McGillis later identified them and the main attacker was sentenced to three years in prison.
fame
All this happened before the actress got her breakthrough role in 1985 with her role alongside Harrison Ford in the Amish thriller “Witness” and before she landed the role of Charlie Blackwood, the teacher who trains aspiring Navy pilots, in “Top Gun.”
But the specter of her rape loomed over everything she did. She admitted that she could not use the New York subway without gagging and that without the understanding of her fellow students and teachers at the Juilliard School, she would have committed suicide.
She later admitted that although she had married and divorced a fellow student at the time of the rape, she was living with a woman at the time of the attack and thought the attack was a punishment for being a lesbian.
Read more: Tom Cruise “came in and just fired everyone” in Top Gun: Maverick, singer of 21 Pilots says
She drank excessively and told People: “I got involved in degrading relationships with men. I felt terrible, but it seemed like I deserved it.”
While she took Hollywood by storm with her BAFTA-nominated performance in Witness and the global phenomenon Top Gun, she was struggling behind the scenes.
She took on the role of prosecutor alongside Jodie Foster in the acclaimed 1988 rape drama The Accused, in part because she believed it could help her come to terms with her past.
Another broken marriage
She married yacht salesman Fred Tillman in 1989 and together they had two daughters who are now grown up. But despite their love, cracks soon appeared between the two.
“Deep down, I always knew it wasn’t the truth,” she told The New York Times. “I was never dishonest with Fred about my past and history, but it was a big struggle for me.”
Shortly after McGillis gave birth to her second daughter, her husband was arrested for soliciting sex from a prostitute, who turned out to be an undercover police officer.
By this time, the couple had already moved to Key West, Florida and opened a bar called Kelly’s, where she met bartender Melanie Leis. They hit it off but became self-destructive together.
“We were accomplices and both drank and abused drugs,” said Leis, who is openly gay.
They got clean, McGillis divorced Tillman in 2002, and the actress left Hollywood to raise her daughters as a single mother with Leis in rural Pennsylvania.
Eventually the couple moved to New Jersey, where the actress took a job as a counselor, working with alcoholics and drug addicts at a nearby rehabilitation facility and becoming a volunteer prison visitor.
Come back
It wasn’t until 2008 that McGillis reappeared on the entertainment world’s radar when she took on a role in the lesbian TV drama The L Word. A year later, she officially came out in an interview with SheWired.com.
“I’m done being a man,” she said, explaining that now that her children are grown, she no longer feels the need to pretend. “Life is a journey and it’s about growing and changing and coming to terms with who and what you are and loving who and what you are.”
She appeared in the indie vampire film “Stake Land” and the cult horror film “The Innkeepers” and finally married Leis in a civil ceremony in 2010, which they celebrated in a 1950s-style diner.
Today
The couple separated in 2011, but McGillis, now a grandmother, continues to live her past as an artist – to some extent.
In 2016, she was attacked by a complete stranger in her own home in North Carolina. The woman was later convicted of burglary.
Shortly after the attack, McGillis said she received a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
She also spoke about why she didn’t appear in Top Gun 2. She believes she has been turned down for lead roles recently because she refuses to have plastic surgery or dye her now gray hair blonde again.
She told Entertainment Tonight: “For a long, long time I really tried to be someone I’m not – and I have to say, it ruined my life in many ways.”
But Top Gun director Joseph Kosinski denied this and said he wanted to give the film a different direction with different characters.
“I’m old and I’m fat,” she said. “And I look my age. And that’s not what this whole scene is about.”
“I would rather feel absolutely comfortable in my skin and at my age than worry about all that other stuff.”
Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick are streaming on NOW and Paramount+.
Watch: Top Gun 2 director talks about Kelly McGillis’ absence
