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Tragic Details About Kelly Preston Revealed

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She spent nearly 30 years married to her teenage crush John Travolta, but Kelly Preston’s life off-screen carried more heartbreak than most fans ever knew.

Preston died on the morning of July 12, 2020, at age 57, following a breast cancer battle she kept private for two years. Her husband of nearly 29 years, John Travolta, confirmed her death. Long before that final chapter, though, Preston had already survived a string of personal ordeals that rarely made it into her glossy Hollywood profile.

• Preston died July 12, 2020, at 57, after an undisclosed two-year battle with breast cancer, confirmed by husband John Travolta.
• Before marrying Travolta in 1991, she dated George Clooney and was briefly engaged to Charlie Sheen, whose gun accidentally discharged and left her with shrapnel wounds requiring stitches.
• Her son Jett died at 16 from a seizure in the Bahamas in January 2009, and the family later faced a $25 million extortion attempt tied to his medical records.

A Career That Ran Through Twins, Jerry Maguire and SpaceCamp

Preston built her name in the kind of films that stayed in rotation for decades — she played Marnie Byrnes in Twins alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, appeared in the 1986 adventure SpaceCamp, and later showed up as Avery Bishop, Jerry Maguire’s fiancée, in the 1996 Cameron Crowe film that made “show me the money” a permanent part of the pop-culture vocabulary. It was a career built well before her marriage to Travolta in 1991, and it kept running alongside her life as a wife and mother for decades after.

The Charlie Sheen Incident and a “Complete Accident”

Preston’s relationship history before Travolta included an “intense love affair” with George Clooney in the late 1980s, followed by a brief engagement to Charlie Sheen in 1990. That engagement ended abruptly after a gun in Sheen’s possession accidentally discharged, leaving Preston with shrapnel wounds that required stitches. Tabloids spent two decades speculating that Sheen had shot her outright, a rumor neither party addressed publicly until Preston finally spoke to TMZ in 2011, laughing off the incident as, in her words, “a complete accident.”

Sheen gave his own account during his 2011 My Violent Torpedo of Truth tour stop in Vancouver, telling the crowd he was in the kitchen making coffee when he heard a gunshot upstairs. He said a revolver in his pants pocket discharged when Preston moved the pants.

“Shot a bullet right between her legs…[She was] hit with shrapnel from the toilet bowl.”

The Loss of Jett Travolta

Nothing that came before compared to what the family endured in January 2009, when the couple’s 16-year-old son, Jett, died from a seizure while the family was vacationing in the Bahamas. Preston and Travolta later testified during legal proceedings that Jett had autism and suffered frequent seizures, a private struggle the family had managed for years before his death became public.

An Extortion Plot Followed the Family’s Grief

The tragedy didn’t end with Jett’s death. An ambulance driver and a Bahamian politician attempted to extort $25 million from the family by threatening to publish sensitive documents related to Jett’s emergency medical treatment. The first trial against them ended in a mistrial, and rather than put the family through a retrial, John Travolta and Kelly Preston chose to drop the charges to spare their family further pain — a decision that closed the legal chapter but left the underlying grief untouched.

Preston spent her final days receiving medical care privately, away from the public she’d performed for since the 1980s, before dying at the family’s home in Clearwater, Florida. Readers looking at how many other familiar faces the entertainment world lost around the same stretch of 2020 can find more in The Long List Of Celebs Who Have Died In 2020, and Preston’s story sits alongside other quietly devastating Hollywood exits covered in Tragic Details About Billie Holiday.