05/28/2026
Kelly was one of the kindest people that I worked with in my entire career.
I’m so grateful that AP hired me for the film. And I still have solid relationship relationships from that job.
I wish John was on Facebook so I could tag him here. 
She was dying. And for two years, she made sure almost no one knew. She was born in Honolulu on October 13, 1962. Her name was Kelly. But her parents gave her a second name, a Hawaiian one: Kamalelehua. They named her for the lehua blossom of the ʻōhiʻa tree.
Here is what that flower does. When a volcano erupts and the lava cools into black, dead rock, the ʻōhiʻa lehua is the FIRST living thing to push up through it. Before anything else can take hold, it blooms. Color, returning to the ground that was burned.
Her parents could not have known how much that name would come to mean.
When she was three, her father drowned. Her mother remarried, and the family moved around the world and back, Iraq for a time, then Australia. But she came home to the islands, and in 1980 she graduated from Punahou, the same Honolulu school that produced Barack Obama.
Then she left for the mainland, and she became a star. In 1988 she stood between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in Twins, and America learned her face. Jerry Maguire. For Love of the Game. More than sixty films and shows across forty years.
But the people who knew her rarely started with the movies. They started with the way she made a room feel.
Then, on January 2, 2009, the worst thing that can happen to a mother happened to her. Her son Jett was sixteen years old. He had a seizure while the family was on vacation, and he did not come back from it.
She had dreamed of being a mother since she was a little girl babysitting for pocket change. She had three children. And now she had to put one of them in the ground.
Most people would have folded inward and stayed there. She did the opposite. On November 23, 2010, at the age of forty-eight, she had another baby, a son named Benjamin. The family called him their new beginning.
Asked once what she had learned, she said: "Don't sweat the small things. Love your kids like it could be the last moment."
She already knew it could be.
In 2018, the doctors found breast cancer. She told almost NO ONE. For two years she kept living, kept showing up, kept being the light in the room while her own was quietly going out. The last time the public saw her was a red carpet in June of 2018, standing next to her husband. After that, she simply stepped out of view and let everyone assume she was fine.
She spent two years being everyone's light, and never let them see the dark.
She died on July 12, 2020, at home in Clearwater, Florida. She was fifty-seven. When the news broke, her husband John wrote that his beautiful wife had "lost her two-year battle" and "fought a courageous fight." Then he said he needed to go quiet for a while, to be there for the children who had lost their mother.
And then her daughter Ella, who had grown into the image of her mother, wrote the truest words anyone found. She had never met anyone, she said, "as courageous, strong, beautiful and loving as you." Her mother had "a glow and a light that never ceases to shine," she wrote, the kind "that makes anyone around you feel instantly happy."
That light did not die with her. It went into her three children. It went into the films people still play on a quiet afternoon.
And it stayed in her name.
Because somewhere in Hawaii, right now, on a field of cold black lava where nothing has any business living, a lehua blossom is opening. First. Before anything else. Bringing the color back.
Her parents named her Kamalelehua before they had any idea who she would be. The flower that blooms first. The one that brings life back to the ground that was burned.
She did that for everyone around her, through a drowned father, a buried son, and her own long, quiet goodbye. And she never once asked anyone to carry it with her.
The lava is always cooling somewhere. The lehua is always first.
She was, too.
