Top Gun's vanishing act: Whatever happened to Kelly McGillis?

Anyone with fond memories of Tom Cruise's first foray into the danger zone will find many familiar faces in Top Gun: Maverick. The sequel, finally arriving 36 years after the original, puts Cruise back in the pilot's seat, finds a new storyline for Val Kilmer's Iceman, and makes endless references to Anthony Edwards' deceased Goose – a major presence in the movie thanks to his pilot son, played by Miles Teller.

But it may surprise you that one major character is missing in action: Cruise's love interest Kelly McGillis, who played astrophysicist and civilian flight instructor Charlotte "Charlie" Blackwood.

But one person unsurprised by the omission is McGillis herself. "They did not [get in touch] and nor do I think they would ever," the actress, now 64, explained in 2019. "I mean, I'm old and I'm fat and I look age-appropriate for what my age is. And that is not what that whole scene is about! But, to me, I'd much rather feel absolutely secure in my skin and who and what I am at my age as opposed to placing a value on all that other stuff."

Not that McGillis is the only actress ejected from the new film. Meg Ryan played the joyous, uninhibited Carole, wife of Goose, in Top Gun, and it made her a star. She'd soon become synonymous with the romcom's Golden Age in When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless In Seattle, before drawing harsh reviews with more dramatic fare (particularly the feminist erotic thriller In The Cut).

Ryan all but retired from acting in the 2010s as opportunities disappeared and Hollywood's sexism and ageism worked against her A-list status. But after over 10 years of fruitless attempts, she's set to direct her first feature this year with the romance What Happens Later, starring opposite David Duchovny. A Ryannaisance is coming.

McGillis at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2010. Photo / Getty Images

McGillis, in contrast, is determined to remain one of Hollywood's greatest "Whatever happened to...?" stories. Her reaction to being written out of the sequel is typical of a star who always had an uneasy relationship with fame, and who, in recent years, has been busier teaching acting than being on-screen.

Extraordinarily beautiful but in an unconventional, almost chameleonic way, McGillis was never comfortable as a leading lady or a sex symbol, and spent most of her film career feeling insecure in her own skin – and being made to doubt her own attractiveness by director after director.

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There's a wild contrast between her signature roles: the buttoned-up, carefully withdrawn mother in Witness and the fiery, intellectual and extremely confident Charlie in Top Gun. She could project a sort of old-school Hollywood glamour in jeans and a white shirt, but – not least because of her 5'10" stature – seemed entirely capable of standing up to any leading man who came her way.

Yet McGillis's Hollywood success always came loaded with self-doubt. She was cast opposite Tom Conti in her first film, 1983's Reuben Reuben, while she was still studying at Julliard. Not allowed to miss classes, McGillis flew from New York to the northern California set at weekends and on holidays. She needed basic filmmaking terms explained in her first days on set, and endured the "hate stares" of other students during the week. But she was determined to finish Julliard: having dropped out of her Californian high school to pursue acting, she already felt a lingering sense of being "inarticulate and stupid and unintelligent".

McGillis's character Charlie is serenaded by Cruise's Maverick in Top Gun. Photo / Getty Images

That lack of self-belief hid an even greater trauma. In 1982, McGillis had been raped at home by two men, and testified against one of them at trial (the other was never convicted). She first spoke publicly about it in 1987 while promoting The Accused, a film where Jodie Foster played a rape victim and McGillis was the prosecutor going after her attackers.

Cynics accused her of opening up for publicity, though the years of work she has done since with rape advocacy groups belies that notion. In fact McGillis heard other victims talking about their experience during the making of the film and "thought that my not talking about my own experience was the most cowardly act of my life". But even then she held something back.

What she did not admit until much later is that she was living with a girlfriend at the time, and that her girlfriend was also assaulted. "I created this story, that I'm being punished because I'm gay," she said in 2010 of her own internalised anguish. In the years following the attack she subsumed her misery in drink and in work.

Her talent ensured that work was usually available, though there were blows along the way. Early in her career, planned roles in a Broadway production of Garson Kanin's comedy Peccadillo, and a big-screen sequel to Chinatown, The Two Jakes, something that she prepped for months, fell apart for reasons beyond her control. But what hurt more was being fired from the forgotten Tom Hanks sex comedy Bachelor Party because, the producers said, she wasn't sexy enough. Already insecure in her looks, McGillis was devastated by the critique; she later said it depressed her for a year.

"I don't think I'm pretty or sexy, except when I'm with a lover in bed," she said in 1987. "Physically I'm sort of overweight and cockeyed. I'd really like to think that my beauty, such as it is, is an attitude." McGillis had been overweight in high school, 15 stone by her own account, and "couldn't get a date for my high-school prom on my hands and knees".

Yet her star was rising, as the lead role in Witness followed her debut. Director Peter Weir had searched high and low for a leading lady, and had heard good things about Ewa Fröling in Fanny & Alexander. But when he went to the cinema Bergman's film was sold out so he bought a ticket to Reuben Reuben instead – and there she was. He had to fight for McGillis to be cast as his Amish heroine over bigger names, but the actress leapt at the chance. "There are so few opportunities to play really different women in films today," she said at the time, "and the chance to be an unmodern woman in a modern film was too good to miss."

Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis in 1985's Witness. Photo / Getty Images

McGillis spent time in an Amish community and gave Weir the "honesty and simplicity" he wanted with a quietly powerful performance. However, the film's famous bathing scene, where Harrison Ford's detective finds McGillis's widowed Rebecca stripped to the waist and washing from a basin, was an ordeal. She'd already endured a nude scene in her first film, which she described as "sort of humiliating". Of Witness she said, "It's not easy for me to take my clothes off in front of anybody – I don't have a very good self-image," and reported that it left her feeling "absolutely vulnerable".

But in the 1980s, nudity was the price of stardom. Top Gun, McGillis's third film, would have another love scene, albeit shot in silhouette because she had already changed her hair in preparation for a future role. Even on that set, after being pursued for the role, she remained convinced she was a failure. McGillis once asked producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson during filming if that would be the day they fired her; when she was compared to Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman she just asked: "How could anyone live up to that?"

McGillis signed up for more films in quick succession, hoping that work could keep her demons at bay, but was conflicted about the resulting stardom. "There was a point after Top Gun when I felt I could have easily been wooed by the Hollywood megastar system – the lure of money and fame. In the midst of all this hype, I was suddenly a movie star – which I never set out to be – and it scared me."

Director Peter Yates, who worked with her on The House On Carroll Street around that time, described her as "permanently paranoid". But, he added: "There is enormous charm about her, she's always trying to improve herself."

McGillis's break with Hollywood stardom finally came in 1989, after working on Abel Ferrara's Cat Chaser, which is widely assumed to be the film she was referring to when she once spoke about "the most hateful experience of my life". She clashed with co-star Peter Weller, perhaps because of his insistence on staying in character at all times but also, reportedly, over a sense that she was the true star of the film.

Kelly McGillis and Peter Weller on the set of Cat Chaser in 1989. Photo / Getty Images

During a two-week break from filming ahead of a nude scene, she apparently surprised the filmmakers by getting breast augmentation surgery (in earlier interviews she had complained of having "no bustline") and reacted with horror to Ferrara's idea that a stunt double would stand in for her during a rape scene, taking this as criticism of her figure and insisting on doing the work herself.

Unhappy and disillusioned after that shoot, McGillis took six months off, had a baby, and finally decided: "I do love acting; I just don't want to work with ass***** any more." She married Fred Tillman, a yacht salesman, had another child, and returned to acting. But her 1990s was full of flops, straight-to-video films and small theatrical productions.

Then the media came after her. In 1993, Tillman was arrested for solicitation and The Sunday Times reported the news as follows: "The recent arrest of overweight actress Kelly McGillis's husband, Fred, for allegedly trying to hire a prostitute, just goes to show how dangerous it can be to test a man's unconditional love for you by letting yourself go." McGillis had given birth to their second daughter five days before Tillman's arrest, but such attacks would become common.

Her weight was a constant surprise to the press; a 1988 article in Options magazine saw her describe herself as "frumpy and crabby", but it was they who captioned two pictures of her, one an unflattering paparazzi shot and another a Top Gun publicity still, "Porky and Best". When she appeared in a free production of Shakespeare in the Park in 1996 the Daily Mail sneered at her weight and buzz cut and delighted in how far she had fallen from sex goddess status.

McGillis and Tillman patched things up in the aftermath of his arrest. In 1994 she bought him a luxurious yacht, and he responded by having a new figurehead carved for it in her likeness. But in 1996 the yacht burned, and the marriage followed in 2002. By the start of the new century McGillis was making serious attempts to quit alcohol for good, which included spending time in a halfway house in the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside near where Witness was set.

She started dating Melanie Leis, to whom she would briefly be married in 2010. There had long been rumours about her sexuality (even during the making of Top Gun, when she was in fact dating Barry "Wolfman" Tubb) but McGillis waited until her daughters were older before formally coming out to website SheWired in 2009. While McGillis never quit acting, she has since shunned stardom almost entirely.

"It wasn't a major decision that I made to leave; it's just that other things became more important. I love what I do, I love the theatre, but my relationships with other people became more important than my relationship to fame," she told Entertainment Tonight.

For all that she has endured, the McGillis who expressed shock at the idea of returning for a Top Gun sequel seems like a happier woman than the one who made the original film. Top Gun: Maverick found a leading lady in Jennifer Connelly instead, at 51 a mere eight years younger than Cruise (who has played opposite women closers to two decades younger for most of the past 10 years).

Now living in North Carolina, she teaches acting, and makes no apologies for failing to maintain the image of the woman she was 35 years ago. Stepping away from Hollywood, she says, allowed her to find a sense of self-worth beyond her job. She seems content to have left behind the self-conscious, closeted and unhappy years of her stardom. Perhaps being the top gun isn't the most important thing after all.