Kevin Costner

• 1. Introduction

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  Kevin Costner was on a plane home from his honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta in 1978 when he noticed actor Richard Burton and decided to approach him. Costner had just finished college and was unsure whether he should try acting at all. So he asked Burton for advice. He also asked a more personal question: could a person be an actor without turmoil in their private life? According to Costner, Burton said he thought it was possible. Costner still credits that conversation with pushing him toward the profession. Decades later, he would hold two Academy Awards, lead a hit television drama and bankroll a sprawling Western of his own. He would also face lawsuits, box-office failures and a reputation that took damage. Was Burton right about the turmoil? How did a young man with no acting training build a career across five decades? And what does he do with the freedom that success buys?

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• 2. Before the Cameras

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  Kevin Michael Costner was born on the 18th of January 1955 in Lynwood, California, and grew up in Compton. He was the youngest of three boys, and the second brother died at birth. His mother, Sharon, was a welfare worker. His father, William, was an electrician who became a utilities executive. Costner was raised Baptist and sang in the First Baptist Choir. He took piano lessons, wrote poetry and played sports, football above all. School itself did not hold his interest. As a child, he watched the 1962 film How the West Was Won, and he says it inspired his love of Westerns.

  His father's career kept moving the family around California, and Costner has said the constant new friendships cost him a lot of confidence. He lived in Ventura, then Visalia, and joined the marching band at Mt. Whitney High School. He graduated from Villa Park High School in 1973, where he played baseball alongside Dennis Burtt. In 1978 he earned a degree from California State University, Fullerton, and he joined the Delta Chi fraternity there.

  After the plane ride, he agreed to a job as a marketing executive. That job lasted 30 days. With his wife's support, he began taking acting lessons five nights a week. To pay tuition, he worked on fishing boats, drove a truck and led tours of movie stars' homes in Hollywood.

  His screen debut came in Sizzle Beach, U.S.A. in 1981. A year later, Ron Howard's Night Shift gave him a bit part credited as "Frat Boy #1". In 1983 he starred in Stacy's Knights, appeared in a commercial for the Apple Lisa, and took a small role in the nuclear holocaust film Testament.

  That same year he was cast in The Big Chill as Alex, the friend whose suicide brings the others together. His scenes were planned as flashbacks, and they were cut from the finished film. Director Lawrence Kasdan, a friend, promised him a part in a future project. That project was Silverado in 1985, and it became Costner's breakout. The same year he made Fandango and American Flyers, and he shared an hour-long Amazing Stories special with Kiefer Sutherland.

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• 3. Stardom and Dances With Wolves

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  Eliot Ness, the federal agent of The Untouchables, made Costner a movie star in 1987. He also led the thriller No Way Out that year. Two baseball films followed, Bull Durham in 1988 and Field of Dreams in 1989, and they secured his place among Hollywood's top leading men.

  In 1990 he teamed with producer Jim Wilson to found Tig Productions. Its first project was the epic Dances With Wolves, which Costner both directed and starred in. The film earned 12 Academy Award nominations and won seven. Two of those wins belonged to Costner himself, for Best Picture and Best Director. The same year he starred in Revenge, directed by Tony Scott, alongside Anthony Quinn and Madeleine Stowe. Costner had wanted to direct that film himself.

  In 1991 he played Robin Hood in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, also serving as a producer, with Alan Rickman, Morgan Freeman and Christian Slater in the cast. Reviews were mixed, but the box office was immense. That year he also played District Attorney Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone's JFK. The film drew controversy over historical inaccuracies, yet people praised its style, direction and performances. Costner earned a Golden Globe nomination. Critic Roger Ebert called his work "a measured yet passionate performance".

  Opposite Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard in 1992, Costner again took a producer credit. The film became a pop-culture sensation and a financial success. In 1993 he played a criminal on the run in Clint Eastwood's A Perfect World. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote that Costner "seems about as pathological as a koala bear".

  In 1994 he took the title role in Wyatt Earp, directed by Kasdan, and produced it too. That year's The War, which co-starred Elijah Wood, drew little attention. The biggest gamble of his career was already taking shape.

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• 4. Highs and Lows

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  Waterworld in 1995 and The Postman in 1997 were science fiction epics set after the collapse of civilization. Both disappointed commercially, and critics largely judged them artistic failures. Waterworld at least managed respectable box office and a few positive reviews. The Postman, which Costner also directed, fared far worse. It won five Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture, and Worst Actor and Worst Director for Costner.

  Between those two films came Tin Cup in 1996, a golf comedy for Ron Shelton, who had directed him in Bull Durham. Costner also developed Air Force One and was set to play the President. He chose to concentrate on finishing The Postman instead, and he personally offered the project to Harrison Ford. In 1999 he starred in Message in a Bottle with Robin Wright, based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. Reviews were mixed, and the film just about broke even.

  Thirteen Days in 2000 revived his fortunes somewhat. He played Kenneth O'Donnell, a top adviser to John F. Kennedy. In 2003 he directed and starred in the Western Open Range, which won critical acclaim and surprised everyone commercially. Some of his best reviews came for a supporting role as retired baseball player Denny Davies in The Upside of Anger. That performance won the San Francisco Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor. After The Guardian, he played a serial killer in Mr. Brooks.

  On the 6th of September 2006, his handprints and footprints were set in concrete outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre. In 2008 Tig Productions closed and became Tree House Films. The Company Men, with Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010 and reached cinemas in January 2011.

  Man of Steel brought him a role as Jonathan Kent. He had to drop out of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained because of scheduling conflicts. A Little War of Our Own, announced in 2011 as his return to directing after seven years, has produced no updates since.

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• 5. Small Screen and Horizon

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  Hatfields & McCoys premiered on the 28th of May 2012 on the History Channel and drew a record 13.9 million viewers. Costner played Devil Anse Hatfield in a three-part telling of a feud that spanned decades and nearly started a war between Kentucky and West Virginia. The role earned him an Emmy, a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe.

  From 2018, he played rancher John Dutton on Yellowstone, which he also executive produced. It was the first regular television series role of his career. His time on the show lasted until midway through its fifth season. He received a Golden Globe for it. In 2025, a story from the Hollywood Reporter described the production as full of power struggles and arguments, and listed it among incidents that have marred his reputation among colleagues.

  Film work continued alongside. In 2014 he played Thomas Harper in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, starred in 3 Days to Kill and Draft Day, and produced and starred in Black or White, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2015 he coached cross-country runners in McFarland, USA. Al Harrison, a NASA supervisor in Hidden Figures, followed in 2016, and Molly's Game, Aaron Sorkin's directorial debut, came in 2017. In 2019 he voiced Enzo the dog in The Art of Racing in the Rain, his first voice-over film. Let Him Go, with Diane Lane in 2020, became a number one hit during the pandemic.

  In August 2022, Costner began shooting Horizon: An American Saga, a Western epic planned as at least four films, each just under three hours. He stars in and directs it. He said the idea began as an event television series. The first film was expected to need at least 220 days of production, but finished by November 2022. Work on the next films was underway by May 2023.

  Chapter 1 arrived in June 2024 to mixed reviews and flopped at the box office. Chapter 2 also received mixed reviews after its debut at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, though it had been set for release on the 16th of August 2024. Poor returns for the first film contributed to an indefinite delay of the second.

  Across his career he holds two Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, one Primetime Emmy and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

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• 6. Songs and Ballparks

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  Kevin Costner & Modern West is a country rock band, and Costner is its singer. He founded it with the encouragement of his then wife, Christine. In October 2007, the group began a worldwide tour with shows in Istanbul and Rome. It also played NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races at Daytona International Speedway and Charlotte Motor Speedway.

  Untold Truths, released on the 11th of November 2008 by Universal South Records, peaked at number 61 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and number 35 on Top Heatseekers. Three singles reached radio, "Superman 14", "Long Hot Night" and "Backyard", though none charted. A second album, Turn It On, followed in Europe in February 2010 with a tour.

  In August 2009, the band was about to go on stage at the Big Valley Jamboree in Camrose, Alberta, when a severe thunderstorm collapsed the stage and stands. One person died and forty were injured. An auction raised money for the two young sons of the woman killed. A dinner with Costner sold for $41,000, and two guitars, one of them signed by Costner, brought another $10,000 each. Tales from Yellowstone, the band's latest album, was written from the perspective of John Dutton, and songs from it appeared in the show's third season.

  Baseball runs through his film roles in Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, For Love of the Game, The Upside of Anger and Chasing Dreams. His home in Austin, Texas, lets him visit Texas Longhorns practices and games. He was close to coach Augie Garrido from the coach's days at Cal State Fullerton, and he cast Garrido as the Yankee manager in For Love of the Game. He tries to attend every College World Series game the Fullerton Titans play in Omaha, Nebraska. As a student, he tried out for the team but did not make it.

  He was also a partial owner of the Lake County Fielders, an independent team in Zion, Illinois, named in homage to Field of Dreams. On the 12th of August 2021, he led the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox onto the field at the MLB game in Dyersville, Iowa, and gave a short speech.

  NASCAR also drew him in. He was ceremonial Grand Marshal of the Auto Club 500 in February 2007 and narrated the 2008 documentary The Ride of Their Lives. In 2009 he became spokesman for NASCAR Day. He also serves on an honorary board for the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.

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• 7. Deals and Disputes

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  In 1995, Costner bought a company developing oil separation machines, built around a patent he purchased from the US government. The machines drew little commercial interest until the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In late May 2010, BP took six machines for testing from Ocean Therapy Solutions, a company in which Costner owned an interest. On the 16th of June 2010, BP leased 32 of the oil-water separation devices.

  Two former investors, Spyron Contoguris and Stephen Baldwin, had sold their stakes in mid-June. They sued in Louisiana, claiming $10.64 million for securities fraud and misrepresentation. They said Costner had kept a meeting with BP secret, a meeting that led to an $18-million down payment on a $52 million purchase. They claimed another investor used part of that money to buy their shares for $1.4 million and $500,000. In June 2012, a federal jury in Louisiana rejected the claims after deliberating for less than two hours. The court ordered the two men to reimburse Costner and the other defendants for their costs.

  On the 6th of June 2004, Costner opened Tatanka: The Story of the Bison, one mile south of Deadwood, South Dakota. Promoters described a $5-million attraction with a 3,800-square-foot interactive center. Its centerpiece is a bronze sculpture by Peggy Detmers showing 14 bison running from three Lakota riders on horseback, with three of the bison posed in midair over a cliff. Costner commissioned it in 1994. Each of the five-fourths-scale bronzes weighs between 2,500 and 8,000 pounds, and they were cast at Eagle Bronze Foundry in Lander, Wyoming.

  Nearby, he opened the Midnight Star Casino and Restaurant in Deadwood in 1991. He hired Francis and Carla Caneva to run it and gave each a 3.25 percent stake. After he ended their employment in July 2004, they refused to leave quietly. Costner dissolved the partnership, and an accountant valued it at $3.1 million. The Canevas sued and won in the lower court, but lost on appeal in the South Dakota Supreme Court. Costner closed the casino in 2017 and sold it in 2020.

  In 2020 he co-founded HearHere, an audio travel app created by Woody Sears, and became an investor and narrator. In 2015 he co-wrote the hybrid novel and graphic novel The Explorer's Guild: A Passage to Shambhala, and he also contributed a chapter of advice to Tim Ferriss's book Tools of Titans.

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• 8. Marriages and Politics

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  Costner began dating fellow student Cindy Silva in 1975, and they were married for 16 years. They had two daughters, born in 1984 and 1986, and a son born in 1988. They divorced in 1994, reportedly because Costner allegedly had an affair on the set of Waterworld, and she received an $80 million settlement.

  A brief relationship with Bridget Rooney, who later married billionaire Bill Koch, produced a son born in 1996. He then dated political activist Birgit Cunningham, and in 1996 he lived with supermodel Elle Macpherson.

  On the 25th of September 2004, he married model and handbag designer Christine Baumgartner at his ranch in Aspen, Colorado, after four years together. They have two sons, born in 2007 and 2009, and a daughter born in 2010. She filed for divorce in May 2023, and the divorce was finalized on the 20th of February 2024.

  Politically, Costner began as a Republican, a supporter of Ronald Reagan and a frequent golf partner of the former president. He changed his affiliation in the early 1990s. Since 1992 he has financially backed Democrats including Al Gore and Tom Daschle, though he also gave to Republican Phil Gramm as late as 1995.

  In 2008 he said he had no ambition to run for office, adding, "I've lived quite a colorful life". Days before that year's presidential election, he campaigned for Barack Obama in Colorado. At a Colorado State University rally, he told young voters, "We were going to change the world and we haven't." He added, "My generation didn't get it done, and we need you to help us."

  In October 2014 he sent a tribute to British troops serving around the world. On the 22nd of December 2019, he endorsed Pete Buttigieg at a rally in Indianola, Iowa, and later backed Joe Biden. He also narrated a commercial for J. D. Scholten, who ran for the US House of Representatives. In the 2022 Wyoming House race, he endorsed Republican Liz Cheney.

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