ACTOR
Kevin Costner
78 archived facts 4 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (78)
- #001
Kevin Costner turned down the role in Platoon (1986) because he felt it portrayed American soldiers in Vietnam negatively and he did not want to insult his brother, a Vietnam veteran.
- #002
Kevin Costner spoke at the funeral of his The Bodyguard (1992) co-star Whitney Houston on February 18, 2012.
- #003
Kevin Costner once worked as a bus driver who gave tours of the Hollywood homes of the stars.
- #004
Kevin Costner chose to direct Open Range (2003) instead of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004).
- #005
Kevin Costner was a skilled horseman and rode his own horse in The Postman (1997).
- #006
Kevin Costner's favorite genre is the Western.
- #007
Kevin Costner owns a 165-acre ranch outside Aspen, Colorado.
- #008
Throughout his career, Kevin Costner has deliberately avoided making sequels to his films. He is one of the few blockbuster stars who has so far never returned for a sequel.
- #009
The role of the President of the United States in the blockbuster Air Force One (1997) was written specifically for Kevin Costner. In fact, Costner helped develop the action film in 1996 with Beacon Communications and writer Andrew W. Marlowe. However, due to work delays on his futuristic film The Postman (1997), Costner ultimately had to hand the film over. He personally called Harrison Ford and offered him a once-in-a-lifetime role. Harrison Ford accepted and has always thanked Kevin Costner in interviews for the kind gesture. Air Force One (1997) became one of the highest-grossing films of all time.
- #010
Kevin Costner is a co-owner of the Midnight Star casino in Deadwood, South Dakota, which displays some of his film memorabilia.
- #011
Although he is often compared to Gary Cooper, Kevin Costner has named James Stewart as the Western star who influenced his work the most. As a child, he was especially fond of the five Westerns Stewart made for director Anthony Mann.
- #012
In 2003, Kevin Costner opened the Tatanka Interpretive site in Deadwood, South Dakota. The site features a bronze sculpture depicting a Lakota Sioux buffalo hunt, as well as a museum, a gift shop and the living history of the Lakota Sioux tribe. Tatanka is the Lakota word for buffalo.
- #013
Along with Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, Richard Attenborough and Robert Redford, Kevin Costner is one of six people who have won an Oscar for "Best Director" despite being known mostly as an actor.
- #014
Kevin Costner has two films on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Most Inspiring Films of All Time: Dances with Wolves (1990) at No. 59 and Field of Dreams (1989) at No. 28.
- #015
Kevin Costner twice took on roles that Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson had turned down. The first was Eliot Ness in The Untouchables (1987), and the second was Jim Garrison in JFK (1991).
- #016
Kevin Costner turned down the lead role in WarGames (1983), which went to Matthew Broderick, in order to play Alex Marshall in The Big Chill (1983). His role was later cut.
- #017
Kevin Costner's character in Dragonfly (2002) was written for Harrison Ford to take on the film role. Ford turned it down in order to take a year off from films.
- #018
In April 2006, Kevin Costner spent $28.5 million on a 17-acre oceanfront ranch in Santa Barbara County, California. He and his wife Christine Baumgartner raise horses on their new ranch.
- #019
The role in Bull Durham (1988) was originally written for Kurt Russell.
- #020
Some of Kevin Costner's favorite films are How the West Was Won (1962), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Giant (1956), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Great Escape (1963), Hombre (1967), The Searchers (1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Magnificent Seven (1960).
- #021
Apart from Dennis Haysbert, who played Pedro Cerrano in all three Major League films and also appeared in Mr. Baseball (1992), Kevin Costner has made more baseball-themed films than any other actor.
- #022
In the role of Crash Davis in Bull Durham (1988), Kevin Costner states his personal beliefs. One of those beliefs is "… Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone." In the role of Jim Garrison in JFK (1991), he plays a lawyer determined to prove that Oswald did not act alone.
- #023
Kevin Costner is the youngest of three sons of Bill Costner, an electrician and later a public utilities executive, and his wife Sharon Costner, a social worker.
- #024
Together with his brother Dan, Kevin Costner founded Costner Industries Nevada Corporation (CINC) in Carson City. The company produces a Liquid-Liquid Centrifugal Separator that cleans oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
- #025
Kevin Costner's children are: Liam Costner (born 1996, with former girlfriend Bridget Rooney); Anne Clayton Costner (born April 15, 1984), Lily McCall Costner (born August 4, 1986) and Joe Tedrick Costner (born January 31, 1988), with former wife Cindy Costner; and Cayden Wyatt Costner (born May 6, 2007), Hayes Logan Costner (born February 12, 2009) and Grace Avery Costner (born June 2, 2010), with wife Christine Baumgartner.
- #026
Before succeeding as an actor, Kevin Costner worked as a captain on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland in Anaheim, California.
- #027
In the early 1990s, Kevin Costner played golf several times with former President Ronald Reagan.
- #028
Kevin Costner's production companies are TIG Productions and Treehouse Films. Tig was his father's grandmother's nickname.
- #029
Kevin Costner's favorite films are long epics that contain many stories.
- #030
Kevin Costner grew up in the Compton area of Los Angeles.
- #031
Kevin Costner and Christine Baumgartner had 500 guests on their wedding day: Oprah Winfrey, Bruce Willis, Tim Allen, Don Johnson, Jack Nicholson, Mary McDonnell, David Giammarco, Michael Douglas and his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones.
- #032
In 2008, Kevin Costner was inducted into the Irish-American Baseball Hall of Fame.
- #033
Kevin Costner directed three Oscar-nominated performances: Graham Greene, Mary McDonnell and himself, all in Dances with Wolves (1990).
- #034
Kevin Costner is of English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, German and Swiss-German descent. He has also stated that he has Cherokee roots, but it is unclear whether this ancestry is documented.
- #035
Kevin Costner was chosen by People magazine as one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world.
- #036
The Sioux nation gave Kevin Costner a piece of land after he made Dances with Wolves (1990). Costner built a golf course on that land.
- #037
Kevin Costner appeared in two films about John F. Kennedy but did not play Kennedy; the two films are JFK (1991) and Thirteen Days (2000).
- #038
Kevin Costner's first wife, Cindy Costner, played "Snow White" at Disneyland.
- #039
Kevin Costner was considered for the role of Lester Burnham in American Beauty (1999), but Kevin Spacey was cast instead and won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance.
- #040
Costner's and Ford's casting paths crossed many times before. Harrison Ford turned down the role of Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October (1990), just as Kevin Costner had; Ford made Presumed Innocent (1990) instead, while Costner made the Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves (1990). The Jack Ryan role went to then-character actor Alec Baldwin.
- #041
Kevin Costner is a supporter of Arsenal Football Club (England). In 2003 he was working in London and decided to attend a match, but when he learned Arsenal would be playing away from home, he chartered a private helicopter to take him to the game 260 miles away.
- #042
The lead role in Air Force One (1997) was written for Kevin Costner, but he was still heavily involved in filming The Postman (1997) and suggested the role be given to Harrison Ford.
- #043
Some of Kevin Costner's favorite films are Red River (1948), Ben-Hur (1959), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Spartacus (1960).
- #044
Kevin Costner and his second wife, Christine Baumgartner, spent their honeymoon in St. Andrews, Scotland. Their honeymoon coincided with the annual Dunhill Links Celebrity Golf Tournament, whose regulars include Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Cruise and Michael Douglas.
- #045
Kevin Costner has appeared in five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: The Big Chill (1983), Field of Dreams (1989), Dances with Wolves (1990), JFK (1991) and Hidden Figures (2016). Dances with Wolves won in the category. He also directed Dances with Wolves, which won Best Picture.
- #046
At one point in the 1990s, the longest Kevin Costner went without a Razzie nomination was the two years between The Bodyguard (1992) and Wyatt Earp (1994). As of 2025, however, he has not been nominated for more than 28 years, most recently in 1997.
- #047
Some of Kevin Costner's favorite directors are Frank Capra, George Stevens, John Sturges, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg.
- #048
Between 2005 and 2006, Kevin Costner owned a 10,000-square-foot Spanish Hacienda on an acre of land in the Hollywood Hills, with five bedrooms plus staff rooms, a media room, a billiards room, a tennis court, a gym, a pool, a spa and grassy gardens. He sold it to American Idol (2002) host Ryan Seacrest in April 2006 for $11.5 million.
- #049
Kevin Costner turned down the role of Jack Forrester in Jagged Edge (1985), which went to Jeff Bridges.
- #050
Kevin Costner turned down the role of Adam Gibson in The 6th Day (2000) due to family commitments. The role later went to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
- #051
Kevin Costner has played many roles in films whose characters take on famous real-life criminals. In The Untouchables (1987) he takes on Al Capone and the Chicago mob, in Wyatt Earp (1994) the Clanton gang, and in The Highwaymen (2019) Bonnie and Clyde.
- #052
From the mid-1990s, after the commercial and critical failure of the ambitious science-fiction epic Waterworld (1995), Kevin Costner's box-office appeal declined somewhat, and he revived it a little with the political drama Thirteen Days (2000).
- #053
Kevin Costner joins Sylvester Stallone, Prince, Roberto Benigni, William Shatner and Tom Green as the only actors to have directed performances that won themselves the Razzie Award for Worst Actor.
- #054
Along with Delbert Mann, Jerome Robbins, Robert Redford, James L. Brooks and Sam Mendes, Kevin Costner is one of only six people to win the Best Director Oscar for their first directorial effort: Mann for Marty (1955), Robbins for West Side Story (1961) (which he co-directed with Robert Wise), Redford for Ordinary People (1980), Brooks for Terms of Endearment (1983), Costner for Dances with Wolves (1990) and Mendes for American Beauty (1999).
- #055
On June 26, 2003, Kevin Costner announced his engagement to his girlfriend Christine Baumgartner, whom he had been with since 1999.
- #056
On August 11, 2003, Kevin Costner was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California.
- #057
Kevin Costner appeared in two films with Sean Connery: The Untouchables (1987) and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). Both of Connery's roles in these films were played on television by John Rhys-Davies.
- #058
Kevin Costner attended and graduated from Villa Park High School in Villa Park, California (1973).
- #059
Kevin Costner is one of the few actors to have worked with all three stars of Goodfellas: Robert De Niro (The Untouchables), Joe Pesci (JFK) and Ray Liotta (Field of Dreams).
- #060
From 1996 onward, Kevin Costner played in the Pebble Beach celebrity golf tournament in California every year.
- #061
Kevin Costner is a graduate of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting.
- #062
Kevin Costner was born just one day after his brother Mark's second birthday.
- #063
Kevin Costner was considered for the role of General Munro in The Fifth Element (1997), which went to the late Brion James.
- #064
Kevin Costner was considered for the role of Colonel James Dolittle in Pearl Harbor (2001) but turned it down; the role went to Alec Baldwin.
- #065
Kevin Costner was named by Empire magazine as one of the 100 sexiest stars in film history (#87).
- #066
After the Virginia Tech massacre, Kevin Costner publicly called for increased gun control.
- #067
Kevin Costner is a member of the Delta Chi fraternity, along with G. D. Spradlin and Ashton Kutcher.
- #068
Kevin Costner was attached to the role of Sergeant John McLoughlin in World Trade Center (2006), which went to Nicolas Cage.
- #069
Kevin Costner supported Bill Clinton in the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections.
- #070
Kevin Costner was among the players announced as members of Major League Baseball's All-Century Team at the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park in Boston.
- #071
In both The Upside of Anger (2005) and Mr. Brooks (2007), songs by the New Zealand indie band The Veils appear in scenes where Kevin Costner's character is talking on the phone with another character.
- #072
Kevin Costner and his country rock band Kevin Costner and Modern West performed a concert at the Romania Film Festival in the city of Arad on 3 October 2009.
- #073
Kevin Costner is a New York Knicks fan.
- #074
Kevin Costner was voted the most erotic man by readers of the German magazine "Amica".
- #075
Kevin Costner is the father of Joe Costner, Annie Costner and Lily Costner.
- #076
Kevin Costner is friends with John J. Coinman and uses John's songs in his films.
- #077
Kevin Costner was considered for the role of Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story (1995).
- #078
Kevin Costner graduated from the same university as Gilbert J. Menchaca.
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