Minka Kelly had a complicated childhood, said Jonah Weiner in Cosmopolitan. Her father—onetime Aerosmith guitarist Rick Dufay—walked out when she was still in diapers. And her mother, former Las Vegas stripper Maureen Kelly, preferred partying to parenting. “She was 5 feet 11. Legs up to her ears, gorgeous,” the actress says with a wistful smile. “She got along on that for as long as she could.” Maureen often came home from work at 4 a.m. If she’d raked in a lot of tips, she’d wake Kelly up and take her grocery shopping. “We’d have the whole store to ourselves, and we would have a blast and buy $100 in groceries. And it was just the best day ever.”
But as Kelly grew older, she found it increasingly difficult to cope with her mother’s wild lifestyle. She left home at 19, and moved to Los Angeles to live with her father. Maureen died in 2008, after a long battle with colon cancer. “That’s detectable,” Kelly says angrily. “Talk about being reckless and not paying attention to your body.” But the disease also brought the two women back together again. “By the time she passed I was holding her. I was with her until her last breath.”
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