American actress. She attended the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria, California. In 1979, she moved to New York City to study acting at the Juilliard School, where she graduated in 1983. Her breakout role was that of an Amish mother in the 1985 film Witness with Harrison Ford, for which she received a Golden Globe award nomination. Her next high profile role was that of flight instructor, Charlie, in the 1986 fighter-pilot film Top Gun with Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer. 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. McGillis appeared in dozens of television and film roles throughout the 1990s before taking a break from acting for a few years.
In 2004, she appeared in the stage play The Graduate as Mrs. Robinson, touring the United States. She began working in television again in 2006, then in 2007, she joined the cast of Showtime’s The L Word for its fifth season. McGillis starred in a Pasadena Playhouse stage production of Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman in May 2009, co-starring with Julia Duffy.
McGillis married Boyd Black in 1979, divorcing in 1981. She married Fred Tillman in 1989, and they had two daughters: Kelsey and Sonora. The couple divorced in 2002. She also has two grandchildren.
She was assaulted and raped in 1982. This experience encouraged the actress to pursue her film role as the lawyer who supports Jodie Foster’s character in The Accused.
She came out as a lesbian in April 2009 during an interview with SheWired.com, an LGBT-oriented web site. McGillis said that coming to terms with her sexual orientation has been an ongoing process since age 12, and she was long convinced that God was punishing her for being homosexual. In 2010, Kelly McGillis entered into a civil union with Melanie Leis, a Philadelphia based sales executive; she and McGillis met in 2000 when Leis was a bartender at the restaurant she owned with her then-husband.
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.
McGillis lives in North Carolina, where she teaches acting at The New York Studio for Stage & Screen in Asheville.
Link to Wikipedia biography