Kevin Costner

Kevin Costner: The Stubbornness That Cuts Both Ways

In 1990 a first-time director spent three hours of screen time on a western told substantially in Lakota with subtitles, and the industry waited for the crash. *Dances with Wolves* took twelve Academy Award nominations and won seven, two of them handed personally to Kevin Costner, for Best Picture and Best Director. Thirty-four years later he financed another sprawling western epic himself, released the first chapter, and watched it fail so completely that the second was shelved. The same man made both decisions, for the same reasons.

Compton, Baseball and a Chance Meeting

Kevin Michael Costner was born on 18 January 1955 in Lynwood, California, and raised in Compton, the youngest of three sons of William Costner, an electrician who rose to utilities executive, and Sharon Rae Tedrick, a welfare worker; a second brother died at birth. He was brought up Baptist, sang in the church choir, took piano lessons and played baseball, and dated his lifelong obsession with the American West to watching *How the West Was Won* as a seven-year-old. He graduated from Villa Park High School in 1973 and took a BA from California State University, Fullerton, in 1978, discovering acting only in his final year.

The decisive encounter came on an aeroplane. Flying home from his honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta in 1978, Costner found himself next to Richard Burton, who told him that it was possible to be an actor without wrecking your private life. He lasted thirty days as a marketing executive, then took acting classes five nights a week, paying for them by working fishing boats, driving trucks and guiding tour buses past the homes of film stars.

Cut from The Big Chill

The apprenticeship was long and ignominious. He debuted in *Sizzle Beach, U.S.A.* (1981), took a scrap of a part in Ron Howard's *Night Shift* (1982), and shot a role in *The Big Chill* as Alex, the friend whose suicide opens the film. Every frame of him was cut. Lawrence Kasdan, apparently feeling the debt, cast him in *Silverado* (1985), and that was the breakthrough.

The Perfect Run

What followed was one of the cleanest ascents in modern Hollywood. In 1987 he played Eliot Ness in *The Untouchables* and led the thriller *No Way Out*. Then came the two baseball films that fixed his public character permanently: *Bull Durham* (1988) and *Field of Dreams* (1989). By 1990 he was powerful enough to form Tig Productions with Jim Wilson and put its entire weight behind a project nobody else wanted.

Dances with Wolves and After

The gamble paid at a scale that has few equals. Costner followed it with *Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves* (1991) and, more interestingly, with Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone's *JFK* (1991), which brought a Golden Globe nomination and Roger Ebert's judgement that "as Garrison, Costner gives a measured yet passionate performance." *The Bodyguard* (1992), opposite Whitney Houston, was a commercial phenomenon that outlived its reviews by decades.

Waterworld, The Postman and the Fall

Then the scale turned on him. *Waterworld* (1995) became a byword for runaway budgets, though it eventually earned respectably and has been partly rehabilitated. *The Postman* (1997), which he directed as well as starred in, was not so lucky: it took five Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture, Worst Actor and Worst Director. His sixteen-year marriage to Cindy Silva had ended in 1994 with an $80 million settlement. Within three years the most bankable star in America had become a punchline.

The Long Second Act

He never entirely recovered the altitude, and he never stopped working. *Thirteen Days* (2000) was a solid return; *Open Range* (2003), which he directed, was a genuine critical and commercial surprise; his supporting turn in *The Upside of Anger* (2005) drew some of the best notices of his life and a San Francisco Film Critics Circle award. He played a serial killer in *Mr. Brooks* (2007) and worked steadily in support through *Hidden Figures* (2016) and *Molly's Game* (2017). Television proved the more decisive medium. *Hatfields & McCoys* (2012) drew 13.9 million viewers and won him a Primetime Emmy, a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe. *Yellowstone*, from 2018, made him a fixture in American living rooms until he left partway through its fifth season amid reported production conflicts. Alongside all this he has fronted the country rock band Kevin Costner & Modern West since 2007, bought an oil-separation technology in 1995 whose machines BP leased during the Deepwater Horizon spill, and opened a bison education centre near Deadwood, South Dakota. Then came *Horizon: An American Saga*, conceived as at least four films, of which Chapter 1 arrived in June 2024 to mixed reviews and poor returns, stranding Chapter 2 indefinitely.

Why Kevin Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Costner almost exclusively because of one film, and the honest assessment is that it belongs to a temperament rather than an intellect. What *Dances with Wolves* demonstrated was not analytical brilliance but an unusually accurate feel for American myth combined with a refusal to be talked out of anything. He understood, when the industry did not, that audiences would sit for three hours, read subtitles, and accept a western in which the settlers were the antagonists. He also understood pace: his best direction, in that film and in *Open Range*, is patient in a way almost no commercial American filmmaker permits himself, letting landscape and silence do work that dialogue usually does. Those are real gifts, and the seven Oscars were not an accident.

But the same faculty is indistinguishable from the one that produced *The Postman* and *Horizon*. Costner is not a strategist who occasionally misfires; he is a man who backs his own conviction absolutely, and that conviction has been spectacularly right once and expensively wrong at least twice, most recently with his own money. As an actor his range is narrow by any serious measure. He plays decency, and plays it better than almost anyone, but the register barely widens, and his most admired performances, in *JFK* and *The Upside of Anger*, work within it rather than beyond it. No significant critic has called him a genius. The word that recurs in the literature about him is stubborn, and the fairest thing to say is that his triumph and his disasters are the same trait, seen from different years.

Legacy

Costner restored the western twice, once at the summit of his power and once at his own expense, and made two baseball films that Americans quote to each other decades later. He remains the last movie star to win Best Director for himself, and one of the very few to have been comprehensively humiliated and to have simply carried on working. Whether *Horizon* is finished may matter less than the fact that he tried it at seventy.

Achievements

• Honorary César — 2013
• Academy Award for Best Director — 1991
• Academy Award for Best Picture — 1991
• Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie — 2012
• Worked as actor, film actor and film director