John Travolta marked what would have been Kelly Preston’s birthday on October 13 with a video tribute built around their daughter, Ella Bleu Travolta. The post showed Ella as a young woman in motion — getting ready for the Miu Miu show in Paris, walking the runway and later taking in the Eiffel Tower.
Travolta’s caption left little room for doubt about the message he wanted to send. He wrote that Preston should look at “your baby girl now” and said she should be proud, turning a birthday post into a public salute to a daughter who is now 26 and building a career of her own.
The tribute lands with extra weight because it arrives years after Preston died in 2020 from breast cancer and after the family had already lived through the loss of Jett Travolta in 2009. Jett, born in 1992, died after a fatal seizure while the family was together in the Bahamas, a history that hangs over any public family moment the Travoltas share.
That is what gives the video its emotional pull and its edge. It is meant as a celebration, but it is also a reminder of how much is missing from the frame. John Travolta and Kelly Preston had three children together, and the post centers on Ella in a way that links memory, grief and survival without saying any of it outright.
Ella’s own path helps explain why the tribute feels so current. She acted in Old Dogs and The Poison Rose, landed her first lead role in Get Lost in 2021 and later appeared alongside her father in Propeller One-Way Night Coach, the project he directed. In April 2026, Travolta wrote that fans should look out for her in that film, and this year the two also walked the Cannes Film Festival together in matching black.
Ella has said she always jumps at the chance to do something with her dad, and the birthday post fits that pattern: a father using his platform to honor Kelly Preston while spotlighting the daughter who now carries part of the family story forward. What the post does not answer is when, exactly, Travolta chose to share it in relation to Preston’s birthday — only that, on October 13, he made the memory public again.
