Kelly Preston Biography

Birth Name : Kelly Kamalelehua Palzis

Date of Birth : 13 October 1962, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Height : 5' 7" (1.70 m)

Occupation : Model, actress

Preston was born Kelly Kamalelehua Smith in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her mother, Linda, was an administrator of a mental health center, and her father, who worked for an agricultural firm, drowned when Preston was three years old. Her mother married Peter Palzis, a personnel director, who subsequently adopted her; she used his name when she first began her acting career. She has a younger maternal half-brother, Chris Palzis. As a child, she spent time living in Iraq and Australia. While living in Australia, she attended Pembroke School in Adelaide, South Australia. She later attended Punahou School and studied drama and theater at the University of Southern California.

This bubbly actress and wife of John Travolta began her career as a teen ingénue. Breaking into show business in 1982 under her legal name, Kelly Palzis, Preston landed- her first role as a troubled teenager on the CBS daytime serial "Capitol" (CBS, 1982-87) before making her film debut in the Charles Bronson actioner "10 to Midnight" (1983). By 1983, she had adopted the surname Kelly Preston and had made the leap to primetime when cast as a flirtatious teen vamp in the short-lived series "For Love and Honor" (NBC, 1983-84). Romantically linked to a number of eligible Hollywood bachelors during the 1980s - including Charlie Sheen and George Clooney - Preston married Travolta in 1991, a man with whom she would share both a family and a controversial belief in the religion of Scientology, after meeting the actor on the set of their film, "The Experts," (1989). Ironically, it was her role of the selfish, upwardly mobile girlfriend of fellow real-life Scientologist Tom Cruise in Cameron Crowe's sports agent-skewing romantic comedy, "Jerry Maguire" (1996) that best illustrated her previously untapped skills as a comic force to be reckoned with.