Kevin

He was born Kevin Michael Costner on the 18th of January, 1955 in Lynwood, California. His father, Bill, was a ditch-digger who was later to service electricity lines for Edison of Southern California. His mother, Sharon, bore two other boys - Dan, who was born in 1950, and another who died at birth three years later. Bill's work made family life somewhat nomadic and, denied a settled upbringing, Kevin became a dreamer, writing poetry. He also possessed a great interest in and affection for American history and the natural wilderness, which would later bring about Dances With Wolves, and which saw him, at 18, construct his own canoe and follow Lewis and Clark's river-route out to the Pacific.
In his teens Costner sang in the Baptist school choir and attended writing classes, specialising in poetry. Also, despite only being 5' 2" when he graduated from Villa Park High School (he later sprouted to a hefty 6' 1"), he was keen and adept at most sports, starring at basketball, baseball and football. Again, this early penchant for sport, with all its mythologies and internal and external conflicts, would fuel his later work - like Bull Durham, Tin Cup, Field Of Dreams and For The Love Of The Game. In 1973, Costner attended the California State University at Fullerton, eventually graduating with a business degree. He immediately married his college belle, Cindy Silva (she would bear him three children - Annie, Lily and Joe), and took a marketing job in Orange County. Throughout his college career though, he'd been studying acting, five nights a week, and he continued to pursue his Hollywood dream in his spare time. Then came a life-changing moment. On a plane returning from Mexico, he found himself chatting to screen legend Richard Burton who advised him that his best chance lay in giving up all other distractions and concentrating on acting full-time. Costner followed his promptings, upped sticks and moved to Los Angeles where, in order to feed himself and his wife, he worked as a truck-driver, a deep sea fisherman and as a guide on bus-tours round the homes of the rich and famous. He also captained the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland, where Cindy would play Snow White.
Roles were hard to come by. He'd earlier, in 1974, performed in Malibu Hot Summer, a softcore romp that would be renamed Sizzle Beach USA and relaunched in 1986, after his initial success, despite the fact that he was only in it for five minutes, as a stud in a cowboy hat. He'd then made a return in 1981, appearing very briefly (as Man In Alley) in Frances, the fraught Jessica Lange-starring biopic of actress Frances Farmer, released the following year. Amazingly, but very revealingly, although he only had one line to say, a line which would give him his all-important SAG union card, for an age he refused to say it, being unconvinced that Man In Alley would say such a thing. Eventually he was persuaded to back down and speak up, but to this day he believes it was the wrong thing to do. That is the kind of stubbornness and attention to detail that would see him long labouring under a reputation for being "difficult".
After his pop-up spot on Frances, he moved on to Shadows Run Black where a killer dubbed The Black Angel is slaughtering small town teens. Costner would play the snotty, arrogant boyfriend of one of the victims, who's suspected of her murder. Unfortunately, though cheap horror films were doing good business and providing an entry route into the industry for many young actors, Shadows Run Black was considered an absolute dud, indeed it was once described as "the Plan 9 From Outer Space of slasher movies". It would not see the light of day till 1984. As with Sizzle Beach USA, he would do more for it than it did for him.
Now he was after more serious work. His first major part came in Stacy's Knights, where Andra Millian played a young girl with a talent for blackjack. Kevin would play her mentor and supporter, whose violent death at the hands of casino heavies causes her to seek hefty financial vengeance. Following this would come a brief appearance (though you wouldn't think it was brief from the video sleeve) in Chasing Dreams. This, concerning a young kid who finds relief from family-, school- and farm-life in the world of baseball, would be his first experience of sports movies.
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