Kevin Costner

Kevin Costner's first appearance in a film of any note was as a corpse. He was cast as Alex in The Big Chill in 1983, the dead friend whose funeral assembles the cast, and Lawrence Kasdan cut every flashback in which his face appeared. Kasdan made up for it two years later with a part in Silverado, and that was the beginning. By 1987 he had The Untouchables and No Way Out in the same twelve months, and Hollywood had found its reliable American leading man.

What he did with that standing was quietly odd. Bull Durham in 1988 and Field of Dreams in 1989 were both baseball films, a genre with a poor commercial record, and both worked. Then he put the whole of his credit into a three-hour Western containing long stretches of subtitled Lakota, directed by himself, in a form the industry had written off. Dances with Wolves took twelve Academy Award nominations and won seven, including Best Picture and Best Director for Costner, who was also nominated for Best Actor.

The years immediately after were the commercial summit. JFK in 1991, then The Bodyguard in 1992 - a film largely dismissed on release whose soundtrack went on to sell more than fifty million copies and take the Grammy for Album of the Year - then A Perfect World with Clint Eastwood in 1993. Waterworld in 1995 was the most expensive film made to that date, and the reporting on its budget became a larger story than the film. The run ended there.

The instructive part of the comparison is that he never really left; he changed medium. Hatfields & McCoys won him an Emmy in 2012 and a Golden Globe the following January, and Yellowstone from 2018 made him, in his sixties, the lead of one of the most watched dramas on American television. Another Globe followed in 2023. Most film stars of his generation aged out of the leading role. Costner moved to where the leading roles had gone.