Getting Her Act Together and Taking It Home

There is more to life than movie stardom, and there is more to a comeback than applause.

In the 1980s, Kelly McGillis was every inch a star. Three pictures--”Witness” (1985) with Harrison Ford, “Top Gun” (1986) with Tom Cruise and “The Accused” (1988) with Jodie Foster--attest to that. Her subsequent films failed to achieve such status. There was “The Babe” (1992), in which she played Babe Ruth’s second wife. There were some splendid little films--”Winter People” (1989), “Grand Isle” (1991)--that attracted praise but little attention.

In recent years, she has starred in one small gem, “Painted Angels” (1998), a wrenching tale about prostitution in the Old West, but mostly she has worked on television and on the stage in New York and Washington. McGillis, 44, appeared a few weeks ago on the stage of the Shakespeare Theatre here in the title role of the Jacobean tragedy “The Duchess of Malfi,” a play that runs a full arc of emotions and has a body count even higher than “Hamlet’s.”

“Robust . . . noble, sensual,” the Washington Post’s Nelson Pressley wrote of her performance. “McGillis goes to pieces very well, with pride and pain mingling in her husky cries.... This ‘Duchess’ is powered by flesh.” But where has she been? Before “Duchess,” she hadn’t worked in 18 months.

“Pennsylvania,” she said, seated in a favorite bookstore coffee lounge on a recent morning. “I have a little house there, and I’m getting settled so that my children can come up and live with me and go to school. They’re with their father while I do this job.” McGillis has two daughters: Kelsey, 12, and Sonora, 9. She married her husband, Fred Tillman, in January 1989. A lifelong sailor, she met him at a California yacht dealership where she had gone to buy a boat.

Her new little house is near Reading. “Circumstances just brought me there,” she said. “I decided that fate brought me to Pennsylvania for a reason, so I should consider living there.” What circumstances? “That’s personal,” she said.

She and her husband are separated, and she’s seeking a divorce. Her physician father, with whom she used to sail as a child on the Pacific Ocean, died last year.

“I had life pressures,” she said. “My marriage was falling apart. I came into a period of introspection. I’m really grateful I didn’t have those distractions. It’s so hard when you get caught up in the whole whirlwind of work and that chaos.”

However, she is grateful for this play.

“I’m having a blast doing this play,” McGillis said. “It would never have crossed my mind that I would be having a ball doing a Jacobean tragedy. But I go to work every night and it’s so joyful to go. I have so much fun. It’s so very free. It is dark in certain parts. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s probably weird to hear, but it’s fun.”

There’s a movie in the works for this summer, but she doesn’t think about that.

“All I’m really trying to focus on is the here and now,” she said. “My life has been in such turmoil and such chaos for so many reasons. All I’m trying to do is simplify it and not worry about the future. The future will take care of itself. It will be what it is.”

McGillis has been reading philosophy. She said she has found a spirituality that transcends organized religions. There is a large tattoo on her back in Chinese characters. As discreetly as one can at a window table in a bookstore coffee lounge, she shows it. Roughly translated, it means journey to peace.

“I am on a spiritual journey,” she said. “That’s what works for me.... I don’t think true spirituality can be defined.”

“I’m getting there,” she said. “It’s quite a journey. When I’m there, I’ll be in the ground six feet under. I’ll be a tree. I’ll be a tree next. Who knows what kind. It’s not for me to decide.”