Kevin Costner

Costner has been married twice and is the father of seven children. In 1975, while attending college, he began dating fellow student Cindy Silva. The couple married in 1978 and had three children together: daughters Annie and Lily, and son Joe. Costner and Silva divorced in 1994 after sixteen years of marriage.

Following his first divorce, Costner had a relationship with Bridget Rooney, with whom he had a son named Liam. He later dated model and handbag designer Christine Baumgartner. Costner and Baumgartner married at his ranch in Aspen, Colorado, on September 25, 2004. Together they have three children: sons Cayden and Hayes, and daughter Grace. Baumgartner filed for divorce in May 2023, and the divorce was finalized in February 2024.

Kevin Michael Costner was born on January 18, 1955, in Lynwood, California, the youngest of three sons born to Sharon Rae Tedrick, a welfare worker, and William Costner, an electrician and utilities executive. His middle brother died at birth. Because of his father's changing assignments with the power company, Costner grew up in various communities across California, including Compton, Ventura, and Visalia. He graduated from Villa Park High School in 1973, where he played baseball.

Costner attended California State University, Fullerton, graduating in 1978 with a bachelor's degree in business administration. While in his final year of college, he developed an interest in acting. On a flight returning from his honeymoon in Mexico, Costner had an accidental meeting with actor Richard Burton, who encouraged him to pursue acting full-time. Costner soon quit a brief marketing job in Orange County and took various jobs, including driving trucks, working on deep-sea fishing vessels, and giving bus tours of movie stars' homes, while taking acting lessons five nights a week.

His early screen work included minor parts in films such as Sizzle Beach, U.S.A., Night Shift, and Stacy's Knights. In 1983, he was cast as the deceased friend Alex in Lawrence Kasdan's ensemble drama The Big Chill. Although all of Costner's flashback scenes were eliminated from the final theatrical cut, Kasdan promised him a future project. That promise led to Costner's breakout performance as Jake in the 1985 western Silverado.

Costner attained major leading-man status in 1987, starring as federal agent Eliot Ness in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables alongside Sean Connery and Robert De Niro, and as a naval officer in the political thriller No Way Out. He reinforced his box-office popularity with back-to-back baseball movies, starring in Ron Shelton's Bull Durham (1988) and Phil Alden Robinson's Field of Dreams (1989).

In 1990, Costner partnered with producer Jim Wilson to form Tig Productions and made his feature directorial debut with Dances with Wolves. The epic western, in which he also starred as Lieutenant John J. Dunbar, became an international critical and commercial success. It received twelve Academy Award nominations and won seven, earning Costner personal Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture, as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Director.

He continued a string of high-profile roles in the early 1990s, starring as Robin of Locksley in the box-office hit Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), portraying district attorney Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone's political drama JFK (1991), and playing a protective bodyguard opposite Whitney Houston in the romantic drama The Bodyguard (1992). In 1993, he starred alongside Clint Eastwood in A Perfect World, followed by the historical biopic Wyatt Earp in 1994.

In the mid-1990s, Costner headlined and produced two large-scale post-apocalyptic features, Waterworld (1995) and The Postman (1997), the latter of which he also directed. He returned to sports comedies with Tin Cup (1996) and starred in the romantic drama Message in a Bottle (1999). In 2000, he portrayed presidential adviser Kenneth O'Donnell in the historical drama Thirteen Days, centered on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Costner directed his third feature, the western Open Range, in 2003, starring alongside Robert Duvall to critical acclaim. Over the following decade, he took on diverse roles, including a retired baseball player in The Upside of Anger (2005), a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in The Guardian (2006), a serial killer in Mr. Brooks (2007), and a corporate executive in The Company Men (2010).

His later film projects included playing Jonathan Kent in Zack Snyder's Superman film Man of Steel (2013), an NFL executive in Draft Day (2014), cross-country coach Jim White in McFarland, USA (2015), Space Task Group head Al Harrison in the Oscar-nominated drama Hidden Figures (2016), and Texas Ranger Frank Hamer in The Highwaymen (2019).

Costner took his first major television role in the 2012 History Channel miniseries Hatfields & McCoys, portraying family patriarch Devil Anse Hatfield opposite Bill Paxton. The production drew record viewership and earned Costner the Primetime Emmy Award, the Golden Globe Award, and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie.

In 2018, Costner began starring as Montana rancher John Dutton in Taylor Sheridan's drama series Yellowstone on the Paramount Network, also serving as an executive producer. The series became one of the most-watched programs on American television. For his performance across five seasons, Costner received the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series - Drama in 2023, concluding his tenure on the show during its fifth season.

Costner embarked on a multi-film western project titled Horizon: An American Saga, serving as director, co-writer, producer, and star. The first installment, Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1, premiered in theaters in June 2024, followed by the festival premiere of Chapter 2 at the Venice International Film Festival.

Beyond filmmaking, Costner has pursued country rock music as the frontman of the band Kevin Costner & Modern West, which formed in the mid-2000s and released albums such as Untold Truths (2008), Turn It On (2010), and Tales from Yellowstone (2020). His other ventures include co-authoring the 2015 adventure book The Explorer's Guild: A Passage to Shambhala, investing in oil-water separation technology used during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon clean-up, and opening the Tatanka: The Story of the Bison educational center in South Dakota.