Minka Kelly

• 1. Introduction

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  Minka Kelly dedicated her memoir to her own mother and to working-class single mothers "who were dealt a bad hand." That dedication hints at the life behind the polished television career. Kelly is an American actress, born on the 24th of June 1980 in Los Angeles. Audiences first knew her as a cheerleader in a Texas football drama, and later as a superhero, a First Lady and a concert pianist. Yet her early years offered little sign of any of it. How does a girl raised without stable footing end up on network television? What did she do for work before anyone cast her? And why did she decide, years later, to put her mother's story on the page?

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• 2. Moving Targets

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  Kelly's father, Rick Dufay, was born in Paris and became a guitarist for Aerosmith. Her mother was Maureen Dumont Kelly, and Minka was their only child. Between them she carries French, Irish and Dutch-Indonesian ancestry. Dufay was not the one who raised her. Her mother did, with help from an on-and-off boyfriend named David Gonzalez.

  Maureen worked as a stripper and a bartender, among other jobs, and money was always short. At one low point, mother and daughter lived in a storage shed at an apartment complex after losing their unit. Hoping to earn extra cash, Maureen tried to smuggle drugs across the Mexico-United States border. She was caught and jailed for a time.

  With her mother locked up, young Minka was passed among friends and acquaintances who took her in. In one of those homes, she was physically abused.

  Before she started junior high school, she and her mother moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The move put them near the extended family of Gonzalez, whom Kelly thought of as a father figure. Trouble followed. When Kelly was 16, her mother and Gonzalez fled New Mexico to escape drug charges.

  Kelly moved in with a boyfriend five years older than she was. At 17, she had an abortion. She went through two high schools before graduating from Valley High School in Albuquerque.

  After graduation she got back in touch with her biological father and moved to Los Angeles to live with him. The city where she was born was about to become her workplace.

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• 3. Surgery Before Stardom

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  Her first jobs in Los Angeles had nothing to do with film sets. Kelly worked in sales, first for VoiceStream wireless, which is now T-Mobile, and then for AT&T. Acting was meant to be a hobby on the side while she studied to become a surgical technician.

  A job as a receptionist in a surgeon's office pushed her toward that plan. Being around the medical field made her want more, so she spent a year in surgical technology school. She then worked as a surgical technician, assisting surgeons in the operating room, for four years.

  Throughout that time she kept auditioning for film and television. She landed commercials for Old Navy and Clearasil. Then she took her first acting class and was hooked, and the hobby became a career goal.

  In 2003 she made her screen debut as an extra in The Turbo Charged Prelude for 2 Fast 2 Furious, a six-minute short that introduced the action film 2 Fast 2 Furious. A guest spot on Cracking Up came next. Small parts followed on Entourage, Drake & Josh and American Dreams.

  In 2005 she won a three-episode recurring role on the WB comedy What I Like About You. A much bigger casting call was only a year away.

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• 4. Dillon, Texas

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  In April 2006, Kelly was cast as a series regular on the NBC drama Friday Night Lights. The show grew out of a film about high school football, and it followed a team in the fictional small town of Dillon. Kelly played Lyla Garrity, a student and cheerleader.

  To prepare, she trained with the cheerleading squad at Pflugerville High School. The series premiered on the 3rd of October 2006. Reviewers noticed her, and The New York Times called her performance "heartbreaking."

  The role reunited her with other people connected to the franchise. In 2007 she took a cameo as Ms. Ross in the film The Kingdom, alongside Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner. It was directed by Peter Berg, the creator of Friday Night Lights.

  She stayed with the show through its third season. Her character left for college at the end of that run, and Kelly left with her. She later returned as a guest in season four, and her total came to 52 episodes.

  The show's cast also earned a Gold Derby Awards nomination in the Ensemble of the Year category. In 2009 came another quick but memorable moment. She appeared in the very last scene of 500 Days of Summer as Autumn, a possible new love interest for Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character.

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• 5. Pilots, Reboots and Cameos

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  In August 2008, Kelly was cast as the lead of a pilot for The CW called Body Politic. She played Francesca "Frankie" Foster, a young woman who moves to Washington, D.C. to work for a senator and befriends other eager up-and-comers. Critics who saw the pilot admired it. The CW still chose not to pick it up.

  A similar setback hit the CBS comedy Mad Love. Kelly played Kate in the pilot, a Midwestern girl who falls in love with Henry at the top of the Empire State Building. When the network picked up the series, Sarah Chalke replaced her in the role.

  In April 2010, Kelly joined the NBC drama Parenthood as a behavioral aide to Max, a child diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. She appeared in nine episodes. Her last was "Taking the Leap," which aired on the 29th of March 2011.

  In December 2010, ABC announced that Kelly would star in a reboot of Charlie's Angels. She played Eve French, a street racer. The pilot was filmed in March 2011, and the series was picked up on the 13th of May 2011. It premiered on the 22nd of September 2011 to more than 8.76 million viewers.

  Reviews were uniformly negative. ABC planned 13 episodes but cancelled the show after the fourth one aired. The run ended on the 10th of November 2011.

  Film was kinder to her that year. In The Roommate, Kelly played a college freshman whose roommate, played by Leighton Meester, develops a violent obsession with her. Reviews were generally negative. Even so, the film earned more than $15.6 million in its opening weekend and over $40 million worldwide.

  She also led the mystery comedy Searching for Sonny, which Variety reported she had joined. Its story follows two reunited friends who become suspects in a murder echoing a play they performed in high school. Filming took place in Fort Worth, Texas, in May and June 2010. The movie won Best Narrative Feature at the Festivus Film Festival.

  From the 27th of April to the 29th of May 2011, she took the stage in the Off Broadway play Love, Loss, and What I Wore. Her castmates included Conchata Ferrell, AnnaLynne McCord, Anne Meara and B. Smith.

  In 2013 she played Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in Lee Daniels's The Butler, opposite Oprah Winfrey. Few actresses have portrayed the First Lady Jackie Kennedy on screen. The cast shared a Best Ensemble Cast honor at the Acapulco Black Film Festival in 2014.

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• 6. Dove and Beyond

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  In September 2017, the DC Universe series Titans announced that Kelly would play Dawn Granger, also known as Dove. The role began as recurring. The show premiered on the 12th of October 2018, and in September 2019 she was promoted to series regular for the second season.

  A few months before that premiere, in May 2018, she appeared in a different medium. In the video game Detroit: Become Human, she gave voice and motion capture to North, the right-hand woman of the protagonist Markus and a potential love interest for him.

  In 2021, Euphoria creator Sam Levinson offered her the part of Samantha, a role he had written with Kelly specifically in mind. Samantha is a rich young mom, and Kelly appeared in four episodes of the second season.

  On the 13th of October 2022, Deadline reported that she would co-star with Maggie Grace and Dermot Mulroney in Blackwater Lane. The psychological thriller adapts the 2017 novel The Breakdown by B.A. Paris. It was released on the 21st of June 2024.

  That same year she filmed Ransom Canyon for Netflix, a romantic western created by April Blair. It follows three ranching families in rural Texas. Kelly plays Quinn, a concert pianist, opposite Josh Duhamel. Shooting wrapped in June 2024 after six months in Albuquerque and Las Vegas, New Mexico.

  There was one practical hurdle. Kelly does not read music, so she learned the piano parts by memory and repetition with a teacher in Albuquerque. Her boyfriend Dan Reynolds, of Imagine Dragons, helped by translating the sheet music and showing her where to place her hands. The series premiered on the 17th of April 2025.

  Later in 2025, she led the Netflix romantic comedy Champagne Problems as an executive who travels to Paris and finds unexpected romance.

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• 7. A Mother's Loss and a Call to Service

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  Maureen Dumont Kelly died in 2008 of colon cancer at the age of 51. Her daughter responded by turning outward. As Kelly put it, "I found that the only way to fill that hole in my heart was to be of service. And I wanted to be of service with women."

  In September 2009, she joined Emily Deschanel, Jaime King, Alyson Hannigan and Katharine McPhee for a "video slumber party" on FunnyorDie.com. The video encouraged regular breast cancer screenings on behalf of Stand Up 2 Cancer.

  In December 2011, she went on an eight-day, four-country tour with the United Service Organizations. Among her companions were General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, basketball player Robert Horry and singer Jordin Sparks. Thomas Miles and Sergeant Major Bryan Battaglia were also on the trip.

  Her longest partnership has been with the retailer ABLE, which she joined in 2009. ABLE creates sustainable jobs for vulnerable women in Africa. It began by employing and training women in Ethiopia who had formerly worked in the sex trade.

  In 2015, for International Women's Day, Kelly designed a clutch for ABLE herself, choosing the leather, the color, the stitching and the size and color of the zipper. She told People that year, "I was affected on such a deep and profound level when I heard that one woman chose to go into the sex industry because she had to pay for sister's breast cancer treatment."

  In 2019 she created The Barbara Collection of rings, necklaces and hoop earrings, priced from $28 to $88. It carries the name of one of ABLE's first jewelry designers. In 2020, the Fashion Scholarship Fund recognized her as Social Impact Trailblazer of the Year.

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• 8. Telling Everything

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  Henry Holt and Company released Tell Me Everything: A Memoir on the 2nd of May 2023. It is the book that carries the dedication to her mother. In it, Kelly writes openly about the hard stretches of her childhood.

  Reviewers responded warmly. Publishers Weekly described it as "an immensely moving story of one woman's unconquerable spirit." Kirkus Reviews said the author is not shy about difficult topics, and called the book "A generous and humane memoir." Drew Barrymore praised it as "incredible" and "powerful."

  Readers followed. The memoir debuted at number 12 on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending the 21st of May 2023. Elle and The Washington Post were among the outlets that named it one of the best memoirs of 2023.

  The book also earned a place in the Goodreads Choice Awards, in the category for Best Memoir and Autobiography. For a woman who once lived in a storage shed, the shelf of a bookstore was a long way from the beginning.

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