John Travolta has spent years answering questions about loss. In a recent interview with Extra, the 72-year-old talked about something else: how he and his late wife Kelly Preston did as parents. His verdict was simple. “I can leave this lifetime knowing I’ve done well,” he said, adding that Preston could know she did well too.
He struggled to find the words at first. Every parent, he told Extra, dreams of having ideal children, and his lived up to that and went beyond it. He said he was very proud of them.
Pride is the easy part of that quote. The harder part is the tense.
Travolta spoke about Preston as a full partner in the result, someone whose work as a mother still counts and still gets credited out loud. Six years after her death, he did not say “I raised them.” He said they both did well. Couples who build a family together rarely stop thinking of it as a joint project just because one of them is gone, and Travolta’s phrasing shows that plainly.
Their daughter is now working alongside him. The two recently shared the screen in Propeller One-Way Night Coach, a film Travolta dedicated to Preston and other family members.
She told People in May that both parents always backed whatever she wanted to do. She said they would have supported her even if she had picked a different career, and that they seemed happy she loved the work as much as they did.
Kelly Preston and John Travolta: Married in 1991
Travolta and Preston met on the set of The Experts and married in 1991. They had three children together, two sons and a daughter.
Their older son died in 2009 while the family was on vacation in the Bahamas.
Preston died in 2020. She was 57. A family representative said at the time that she had chosen to keep her fight private, with only her closest family and friends around her, and asked for privacy.
Travolta on Staying Out of the Darkness
Travolta gave a blunter account to Italian newspaper La Repubblica in June. “I’m not made to remain absorbed in the darkness,” he said. He admitted life had tested him, and said he can look at the darkness without choosing to stay in it.
His nature, he told the paper, is to look for the positive even in the face of the worst.
Plenty of widowed parents describe the same split. There is the private grief, and there is the version of themselves the kids need every morning. Us Weekly noted that John Travolta has been candid about staying strong for his children since the family’s loss. Dedicating a film to Preston and then making it with their daughter is one way of keeping both versions in the same room. The marriage ended, but the partnership in raising a family clearly did not, at least not in the way he tells it.
What he did say was that he can leave this lifetime knowing the job got done, by both of them.
Sources: Just Jared, Us Weekly
