Melanie Leis is well-known for having been Kelly McGill’s ex-girlfriend. She is an American actress and sales professional who works in theater. Since Melanie was born in 1967, she is 55 in 2022.
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Table of Contents
Early Life
Little is known about her early years because she first gained notoriety through her relationship with Kelly McGillis. Melanie graduated in the arts, music production, and performance from Berklee College of Music, where she attended college. She also holds an associate’s degree from New Burry College in hotel and restaurant management.
Career
By gaining the best knowledge during her time in college, Melanie Leis laid a solid basis for her future. From September 2001 to July 2003, she was employed by Cingula Wireless (AT&T) as a retail manager. Later on, from February 2004 to January 2008, she worked at PC Management.
Melanie also held a career as a portfolio specialist at Sovereign Bank from May 2008 to May 2009. She has also worked as a Dist. Sales Manager for Simply Wireless/Mobile Now. She worked at Retail Business Development as their market launch team DM after leaving this position in 2010.
Independence Communications, Broadview Networks, All Covered Inc., Society Grownups, Vendeni, PD Corp., and Tappit are a few of Leis’s other employers. Since joining Tappit in 2021, Melanie has served as vice president.
Personal Life
Melanie Leis and Kelly McGillis first connected in a Florida restaurant. In a September 2010 interview with the New York Times, Leis discussed her initial meeting with McGillis, which happened in 2000 at the West Florida pub Kelly’s.
She claimed that she was impressed with McGillis after seeing her beyond her fame. After their initial meeting, Leis and McGillis joined a group that went out to celebrate a friend’s birthday, where they first began speaking.
Once they got used to each other, they began dating and developed dangerous habits. They were cohabitating in Mohnton, Pennsylvania, by 2001. Despite the fact that McGillis and Melanie were dating, there were never any pictures of the two of them together.
Unfortunately, McGillis’s connection with Melanie had a negative impact on her kids. In addition, their new site was very traditional. The main reason Kelly McGillis and Melanie Leis split up in 2009 was that they had evolved and matured at separate paces. Nevertheless, they rekindled their relationship.
In their second attempt at a romance, Melanie and McGillis chose to get married. The actress accepted Leis’ proposal to see whether it would work out. On Wednesday, September 15, 2010, they exchanged vows. Eleven of their friends, including Tillman, Kelly’s ex-husband, were present for the gathering.
Sadly, Kelly and Melanie ended their wonderful romance in 2011, and it’s unclear if they’ve since dated anybody else. Additionally, they withheld the main cause of their split, leaving fans to conjecture.
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Who is Kelly Mcgillis?
Kelly Ann McGillis was born on July 9, 1957, to Donald Manson McGillis and Virginia Joan in Newport Beach, California. Her mother was a stay-at-home mom, while her father was a doctor. Kelly’s mother was Welsh and German, and her father was Scottish and Irish. Due to her father’s job, Kelly moved to Los Angeles when she was a young child, where she spent the remainder of her formative years.
She was drawn to the idea of being an actor at a young age because she was raised in Los Angeles, the hub of the American entertainment industry. Although she saw a remarkable transformation as she grew older, she acknowledged that being overweight during her adolescence had negatively impacted her self-confidence.
After graduating from high school in Los Angeles, she relocated to Santa Maria to pursue professional acting training. She enrolled in Allan Hancock College’s Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts. She then took a major step and relocated to New York City to enroll at the Juilliard School of Acting. While attending Juilliard and graduating in 1983, she performed in numerous theatrical productions. She had already started going to auditions at that point for roles in movies and television.
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Kelly McGillis Career
She was fortunate in that she didn’t have to wait long to get her first acting role on the big screen. In the 1983 movie “Reuben, Reuben,” she made her acting debut in one of the leading parts. Although the movie only had a modest amount of commercial success, it received a lot of positive reviews and was nominated for a few Academy Awards. She made her television debut in the 1984 television movie “Sweet Revenge.” She also made an appearance in one of the “One Life to Live” episodes the same year.
In 1985, she made a significant leap in her career when she took the lead in the neo-noir criminal thriller movie Witness. The movie, which also starred Harrison Ford as the title character, was a huge critical and financial hit. It received eight Academy Award nominations and took home two of them. She was nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for her role in the movie, which further demonstrated how highly the critics praised her performance. Kelly solidified her position as a talented young actress in the industry with the success of the movie.
Her following acting role was a huge hit. She played Charlie Blackwood (Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood) with Tom Cruise in the action drama movie Top Gun from 1986. Although the movie received mixed reviews, it was a huge commercial success and has since grown in popularity. Kelly had the kind of dream start that every aspiring actor could only hope for with these two back-to-back enormous successes. She was inundated with offers.
She appeared as the lead in the fantasy comedy movie “Made in Heaven” in 1987. Although the film’s original premise was praised, it did not result in a strong box office performance. On the spectrum of reviews, the movie did around average. She had a failure with the movies “Unsettled Land” and “The House on Carroll Street,” but in 1988, she made a strong comeback with the movie “The Accused.” She starred in the courtroom drama movie, which received a ton of positive reviews and enjoyed tremendous box office success thanks in large part to Kelly’s portrayal of the protagonist character.
She released fewer movies each year as the 1990s got closer. She made a few movie appearances in the early 1990s, including “Grand Isle” and “The Babe.” She was a supporting or significant character in movies like “At First Sight” and “The Settlement” in the late 1990s. She did, however, frequently appear on television in the 1990s. She did not work on many television programs, but in the 1990s, she was in a lot of TV movies, including “Bonds of Love,” “We the Jury,” and the TV series “Dark Eyes.”
She only featured in 4 movies in the 2000s, including “No One Can Hear You,” “Supergator,” and “The Monkey’s Mask,” significantly reducing her film roles. But neither critically nor commercially, none of her movies proved to be a hit. In the 2010s, she had a few movie appearances, including “Mother of All Secrets” and “The Innkeeper.” ‘The L Word‘ (2008) and ‘Z Nation‘ were the only programs in which she appeared on television in guest appearances (2014).
McGillis’ fourth Amish-themed movie was An Uncommon Grace, which aired on Hallmark Channel. Additionally, she played Rose Lewis, the lead in the 2017 Bermuda-filmed film Mother of All Secrets. She performed frequently on stage in the 1980s and 1990s, starring in plays like “Don Juan,” “The Sea Gull,” “Love for Love,” and “The Merchant of Venice,” among others, and assuming significant roles.
Kelly McGillis Personal Life
McGillis wed Boyd Black, a fellow Juilliard student, in 1979; they separated in 1981. The couple has two kids, Sonora and Kelsey, from their 1989 marriage to Fred Tillman. In 2002, the couple got a divorce. Two guys violated McGillis in her New York apartment in 1982. Leroy Johnson, who was 15 at the time, received a three-year prison term, but the other attacker’s charges were withdrawn for lack of supporting documentation.
At a port in Dania, Florida, in April 1996, a fire completely destroyed “The Centurion,” a 110-foot schooner owned by McGillis and her husband, Fred Tillman, and valued at $1.5 million. During an interview with SheWired in 2009, McGillis came out as a lesbian. She married Philadelphia sales executive Melanie Leis in a civil union in 2010. When Leis began working as a bartender at Kelly’s Caribbean Bar Grill & Brewery in Key West, Florida, in 2000, McGillis and her then-husband Fred Tillman were its owners. The following year, they ended their marriage.
When she and Leis lived together in Collingswood, McGillis spent her days working full-time with drug users and alcoholics at Seabrook House Drug Alcohol Rehab Center in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Hendersonville, North Carolina, is where McGillis currently resides. As of 2013, she was an acting instructor at the Asheville, North Carolina-based New York Studio for Stage and Screen NYS3.
