Biography Magazine

Kevin Costner is batting around an idea: “How would I sum up my philosophy on life?” he ponders aloud. “Sometimes you score, sometimes you strike out, but none of that matters. What matters is how you play the game.”

Baseball metaphors come easily to the 44-year-old actor, director, and producer. “Maybe it’s because I’ve had a lot of practice rounding bases,” he says, referring to three baseball films, Bull Durham (1988), Field of Dreams (1989), and this month’s For Love of the Game. “Or maybe I just read it somewhere, and it sounded good.”

Playful-and modest as he seems, in his 17-year career, Costner has clearly become one of Hollywood’s heavy-hit-ters. Dances with Wolves, his directorial debut, in 1990, won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and this year’s sentimental Message in a Bottle was No. I it’s opening weekend. Which isn’t to say every movie has been a winner: Waterworld, critics still snicker, was all wet.

“Look, I don’t regret anything I’ve done, because it’s always been my choice.” Costner tells Biography Magazine. “I loved Waterworld. I loved Wyatt Earp. I loved postman. Each one moved me, challenged me-and hell, I challenged a lot of people in the process of making them.”

That said, he’s not exactly known in industry circles as team player. Studios clamor for slapstick comedies (“bathroom humor,” he sniffs), while Costner churns out three-hour-plus historical epics with third of the dialogue in the Sioux language.

“People tell you, ‘It’s done this way,”’ he says. “Well, why? And who says so? Who says a movie has to be a certain length or subject matter? I don’t make movies to fit conveniently into your dinner plans. I make movies that have a message.

And if that means refusing to be bullied by Hollywood hot shots, damning the critics, or turning down roles with $20 million salaries, then so be it. Costner, with his aw-shucks Oklahoma accent, lopsided grin, and bashful-boy persona, can act like a tough guy when he needs to.

“When I believe in something, I stand behind it,” he says. Case in point: When ForLove of the Game ran into preproduction budgeting problems (it was shot on location in Yankee Stadium with a couple of thousand extras), Costner sacrificed his salary to see it completed. “Whatever the situation-personal or professional-you have to be true to what you stand for,” he says. “It’s not hard for me to look forward, and it’s not hard for me to look back on my life, because I know one thing@ I’ve always kept my eye on the ball.”

Kevin Michael Costner was born on January 18, 1955, in Lynwood, California,: and raised in neighboring Compton. He was the younger of two sons-his older brother, Dan, was born in I brother, Mark, died at birth. The Costner clan came to C from Oklahoma, after his p grandparents on his father’ family farm during the great dust-bowl disaster in the 1930s. “Mygrandparentslost everything, a la The Grapes of Wrath, and they came out in Model-A Ford to California,” Costner says. “All they took with them was what they could carry.”

His father, he says, was haunted by his history. “It shaped him,” Costner explains. “He saw his dad lose everything.” In Compton, a lower-income suburb of Los Angeles, Bill Costner briefly dug ditches to support his wife and young sons before settling into a job servicing electrical lines for Southern California Edison. “He stayed with the same company his entire life,” Costner recalls. “He’s a noble man, a great man. He probably could have taken other jobs, but he never wanted to jeopardize our financial security. He would look at us sometimes and say, ‘I wish I could do more, but there can be lean times out there-you’ve never seen it.’ He saw it, and he couldn’t forget it.”

Bill Costner’s work took him to other parts of California-Santa Paula, Ojai, and Ventura and he moved his family along with him. “There was a lot of upheaval,” Costner recalls. “I was always the new boy in school-I was like an Army kid.” He was a small, awkward boy-always the shortest in his class who ran around in muddy dungarees, with a homemade bow and arrow over his shoulder.

“I’d hunt rabbits and squirrels and sell the pelts,” he says. “We never had a lot of money. I wasn’t the kid who had two pairs of tennis shoes. That’s not to say ‘Woe is me,’ it was just reality for us. If my basketball got popped, I didn’t get another one.”

Despite the hardships, his childhood was happy. “It was an interesting way to grow up, and I had the best childhood of anyone I know,” he says. “I remember every minute of my childhood. I remember every go-cart, every tree house, every fort, every spankin’, everywhoopin’, every little street brawl I had as a kid. It was an ideal life-just uncluttered and honest.”

Young Kevin was a daydreamer. He would hide in his room, writing short stories about his favorite film heroes and fantasizing out being a cowboy. “I remember being 10 years old and going to the movies to see How the West Was Won “ he says. “It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up-it was magical. I didn’t want to be an actor back then. I don’t think I even thought about it. But I guess, in retrospect, the signs were all there.”

As a teen, Costner sang in the Baptist church choir, composed poetry, and took writing classes. “One side of me liked creative expression,” he says. “But another side liked the great outdoors.” At 18, he built his own canoe and paddled down the rivers that Lewis and Clark navigated on their way to the Pacific. “Maybe I was trying to show I was a tough guy,” he reflects. Despite his height-he was only 5’2” by his senior year of high school-he was athletic and managed to become Villa Park High’s top basketball, baseball, and football star.

With so many talents, the world should have been full of possibilitiesbut Costner had no idea what he wanted to do. In 1973, he enrolled at California State University at Fullerton in a five-year business studies program. “I guess I knew all along I wasn’t a ‘suit’ man, a nine-to five man,” he admits. “But it took awhile for me to start listening to my inner voice.”

A notice in the college newspaper caught his eye: A community theater was staging Rumpelstiltskin and casting a Prince Charming. He auditioned but didn’t get the part. “They were looking for someone good-looking,” hejokes. But that small taste of the performer’s li all it took: Costner signed up for act lessons five nights a week.

“Acting seemed to help me grow literally and figuratively,” he says. His height sprang up to 6’1 “ by the time was 21. “My body finally caught up to big shoe size.”

Costner graduated in 1978 with honors degree in business studies a married Cindy Silva-his college sweet heart-shortly after. He took a marketing job in Orange County but decided to change his career course almost immediately after their honeymoon. On the flight home from Mexico, Costner spotted Richard Burton in first class an asked the legendary actor for his advice. Thirty days later-thanks to Burton talk-he resigned his marketing position and moved with Silva to Hollywood.

He took a variety of jobs-driving a truck, working on a deep-sea fishing boat, giving bus tours of movie stars’ homes to make ends meet. The couple had $13 left in their bank account when a work shop teacher offered him his first roles in two low-budget films. “When you first come to Hollywood, and you want to be an actor, you just want to work, you want to put something on your resume,” he says. “So I did these movies over the course of six months. One was a T&A flick. Then I didn’t work in films for six years after it, purposely. I vowed I’d never do another thing I don’t want to do. I’d never do something that I wasn’t proud of.”

From then on, he did choose good projects but unfortunately always seemed to tip on the cutting-room floor. One sentence of dialogue was all that remained from the Jessica Lange film Frances; director Lawrence Kasdan cut his role in Big Chill severely, leaving only a brief glimpse of Costner-as a corpse-in a coffin. “It was getting frustrating, not to mention embarrassing,” Costner sats “But I had a feeling something would eventually come along.”

It did when Kasdan decided to make things up to him. He created the role the gunslinger, Jake, in Silverado with Costner in mind. As he described him Jake was “reckless, intense, and had untamed energy.” In his mind, the actor embodied all those qualities he was even eager to do his own stunt work. After Silverado, the offers began to poor in. Costner was cast in two lead roles: 1986’s No Way Out and 1987’s The Untouchables. The press was comparing him to Gary Cooper, and he couldn’t walk down a street without being recognized. Bull Durham, in 1988, cemented his title as Hollywood’s new sex symbol: His toenail polishing bedroom scene with Susan Sarandon steamed up the screen.

“I’d like there to be a bit of Crash Davis in me,” he says about his role as a fading baseball star. “There’s the scene when he goes off and hits a home run in obscurity. He does it for himself, not for the crowds, and I think that’s truly heroic.” Heroes are Costner’s forte. “I like men who debunk the theory of what heroism is,” he says. “Men who fall and fail and are flawed but win out in the end because they’ve stayed true to their ideals and beliefs and commitments.” When he read the story for Dances with Wolves, he knew he’d found such a man in the character of Lieutenant John J. Dunbar. And he knew the movie had to be made.

“Hollywood was kind of over Westerns,” he recalls. “In their eyes, this movie was a big gamble. One guy told me to buy a gun and shoot myself-it was a cheaper way to commit suicide.” But it was a risk Costner-as a first-time director, producer, and the film’s star-was willing to take. “I knew it was ambitious, but I also knew that I would die trying.” The picture was plagued with problems: It fell several weeks behind schedule and was running millions of dollars over-budget. “On top of everything else, they wanted to get rid of the subtitles and cut the running time down to two hours, which they thought was more digestible.”

After a three-year struggle to see it through, Costner’s efforts were acknowledged with critical and popular acclaim. Besides the seven Oscars and three Golden Globes Dances with Wolves won, Costner was adopted into the Rosebud Tribal Sioux Nation for outstanding representation of the Native Americans’ plight. “If I never make another movie, Dances with Wolves would complete the picture I have had of myself since I was a little boy,” he said at the time. “It will forever be my love letter to the past.”

But it would be far from the last movie he would make. In 1991, Forbes magazine ranked him as one of the Top 40 Highest Paid Entertainers of the Year (he came in No. 6, with an estimated $59 million, beating out both Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger) Dances with Wolves’ profits reached over $500 million, and his popularity reached heights he never dreamed possible. While he was on the set of JFK in Dallas, local papers ran a “Kevin Watch” column, asking readers to write in about any sightings of the star. “Fame is a funny thing,” Costner reflects. “You feel like you’re the same person, but obviously things are very different. I learned that it can’t be what drives you. You can’t be ruled by the whims and the current, that can’t be what sustains you, because if it is, then that’s what will kill you.”

So Costner stopped listening to the critics who were less than kind in reviewing Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Bodyguard, Wyatt Earp, and Waterworld. “What I want is for my children and my children’s children to see my movies and think that dad or grandpa was a pretty good guy,” he says. “Thomas Jefferson said that a man should try and make decisions behind closed doors as if everybody he ever respected were watching him. Maybe that sounds lofty, but I believe that, and it’s what guides me. I make my choices knowing that these movies are my legacy.”

What he looks for is not what sells but what speaks to him: “The intimacy of detail is very important-how men and women talk to each other. Great lines ring in my ear forever. Movies are supposed to be, at their best, about moments you’ll never forget.”

He says his current project, For Love of the Game, is “closest to the bone” of any movie he’s ever done. Based on the Michael Shaara novel, he describes it as “a provocative, romantic drama.” It’s the story of Billy Chapel, a legendary baseball pitcher nearing the end of his career. “It deals with fame, and it deals with passion,” he says. “It deals with what comes into focus while other things drop away.”

It also deals with the end of a long-term love-something Costner can easily relate to. In 1994, after 16 years of marriage and three children, Costner and Silva divorced. “We’ve tried to handle it with as much dignity as possible,” he says. “We had a life together, and we have a friendship, and we’re keeping in mind what’s most important is our children. People have talked about it almost incessantly. We don’t talk about it almost at all.”

His kids-Annie,14, Lily,12, Joe, I1, and Liam, 2 (a child he acknowledges he fathered with TV reporter Bridget Rooney) -are “without a doubt the number one priority” in his life. Costner is the kind of dad who doesn’t want to miss a moment of their growing up. “In our home, there aren’t any closed doors to them,” he says. “And if they want to go somewhere-to a movie or Disneyland then we go, and I deal with it. I would never restrict my kids from going somewhere because it might make me uncomfortable. I chose this life-they didn’t.”

But fatherhood, he admits, isn’t always easy. “The toughest part about being a dad is you find yourself saying no a lot, and you wish you didn’t have to. You know that there’s a violent world out there, and you have to protect them.”

Costner takes his kids hunting, but he is well aware of the issues surrounding gun control. “I have guns-I have a lot of guns. But I think there should be major gun control, and we need to get rid of automatic weapons. My children are afraid of guns, and they understand them. I’m a strict hunter, and I don’t want my shotguns taken away from me, but I am willing to take a step back. We need to make some tough-ass laws. Who’s gonna do it?”

Coming from Kevin Costner, it sounds like a challenge has just been issued. “I like to stir things up,” he says. “Which isn’t to say I’m always right. I wish I had a life that was mistake-free, but if you take a bite out of life, it’s usually going to take a bite out of you.”

The new millennium has got him thinking: “Ideally, I’d like to be a Renaissance man. I’d like not to feel limited by the things that have interested me before and things I’ve been successful at. I’d like to blow some air into my life and let it balloon up. In the midst of success and in the midst of this life you have, there are doors of opportunity. If I recognize them, will I be smart enough and brave enough to step through them?” He has a project in mind-rumored to be about the Cuban Missile Crisis and he suspects it will cause quite a stir: “Oh, it’s about six and a half hours long,” he teases. “Shut up! You got a problem with that? Someone once said, ‘Pity the man who doubts what he once knew to b true.’ That’s the kind of thing that sits on my shoulder and whispers in my ear. I want to be a man who stands for something.”*