One of Hollywood's most prominent strong, silent types, Kevin Costner was for several years the celluloid personification of the baseball industry. The actor made an indelible mark with baseball-themed hits like Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, as well as his epic western Dances with Wolves. Although several flops in the late 1990s diminished his bankability, for many the actor remained one of the industry's most enduring icons.

A native of California, Costner was born January 18, 1955 in Lynnwood. While a marketing student at California State University in Fullerton, he became involved with community theatre. Upon graduation in 1978, Costner took a marketing job that lasted all of 30 days before deciding to take a crack at acting. After an inauspicious 1974 film debut in the ultra-cheapie Sizzle Beach USA, Costner decided to take a more serious approach to acting. Venturing down the usual theatre-workshop, multiple-audition route, the actor impressed casting directors who weren't really certain of how to use him. That may be one reason why Costner's big studio debut in Night Shift (1982) consisted of little more than background decoration, and the subsequent Frances (1982) featured the hapless young actor as an offstage voice.

Director Lawrence Kasdan liked Costner enough to cast him in the important role of the suicide victim who motivated the plot of The Big Chill (1983). Unfortunately, all that was visible of the actor--who had turned down Matthew Broderick's role in Wargames to take the part--was part of his dress suit, along with a fleeting glimpse of his hairline and hands as the undertaker prepared him for burial during the opening credits. Two years later, a guilt-ridden Kasdan chose Costner for a major part as a hell-raising gunfighter in the "retro" western Silverado (1985), this time putting him in front of the camera for virtually the entire film. The actor's big break came two years later as he burst on the screen in two major films, No Way Out and The Untouchables; his growing popularity was further amplified with a brace of baseball films, released within months of one another. In Bull Durham (1988), the actor was taciturn minor-league ballplayer Crash Davis, and in the following year's Field of Dreams he was Ray Kinsella, a farmer who constructs a baseball diamond in his Iowa cornfield at the repeated urging of a Voice that intones "If you build it, he will come."

Riding high on the combined box-office success of these films, Costner was able to make his directing debut. With a minuscule budget of $18 million, he went off to the Black Hills of South Dakota to film the first western epic that Hollywood had seen in years, a revisionist look at American Indian-White relationships titled Dances With Wolves (1990). Detractors had a field day with this supposedly doomed project, labeling the film "Costner's Folly" and "Kevin's Gate." But the film, in addition to being one of 1990's biggest moneymakers, also took home a slew of Academy Awards, including statues for Best Picture and Best Director.

Costner's luck continued with the 1991 costume epic Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves; this, too, made money, though it seriously strained Costner's longtime friendship with the film's director, the notoriously erratic Kevin Reynolds. The same year, Costner had another hit on his hands with Oliver Stone's JFK. The next year's The Bodyguard, a film which teamed Costner with Whitney Houston, did so well at the box-office that it seemed the actor could do no wrong. However, his next film, A Perfect World (1993), directed by Clint Eastwood and casting the actor against type as a half-psycho, half-benign prison escapee, was a major disappointment, even though Costner himself came through with a strong performance. More bad luck followed Perfect World in the form of another cast-against-type failure, the 1994 western Wyatt Earp, which proved that even director Lawrence Kasdan could have his off days.

Adding insult to injury, Costner's 1995 epic sci-fi adventure Waterworld received an enormous amount of negative publicity prior to opening due to its ballooning budget and bloated schedule, and cemented industry misgivings by failing colossally at the box office. The following year, Costner was able to rebound somewhat with the romantic comedy Tin Cup, which was well-received by the critics and the public alike. Unfortunately, he chose to followed this up with another directorial effort, an epic filmization of author David Brin's The Postman. The 1997 film featured Costner as a Shakespeare-spouting drifter in a post-nuclear holocaust America whose efforts to reunite the country give him messianic qualities. Like, Waterworld, The Postman (waggishly dubbed "Dryworld" by critics) received a critical drubbing and did poorly with audiences. Costner's reputation, now at an all-time low, received some resuscitation with the 1998 romantic drama Message in a Bottle, and the following year, he returned to the genre that loved him best with Sam Raimi's baseball drama For the Love of the Game.