Cinemagoers have endured Kevin’s limp acting for years, but the Costner crown jewels proved one flaccid performance Middle America didn’t have the stomach for. Universal Studios cut a full-frontal shower scene from his latest movie, For the Love of the Game. Costner was furious, but studio execs remained, er, firm. “In focus groups, they said, ‘Do we really need to see Kevin Costner’s penis?’ ” said one. The answer is no: cruel and unusual punishment, don’t forget, is outlawed by the US constitution.
When he’s not making movies about baseball, Costner’s preferred subject matter is one man’s battle to uphold decency in a despairing landscape of post-apocalyptic devastation. In The Postman he plays – you’ve guessed it – a post-apocalyptic postman, fighting to save the noble ideals of truth, justice, the American Way and a prompt and reliable mail service. The film suffered post-apocalyptic audience figures, taking under $20m in the US.
In the three-hour cinematic endurance test that is 1990’s Dances with Wolves, Costner played a Civil War general who switches allegiance to the Lakota Sioux and adopts the name of the title. Hollywood predicted disaster – an hour of the film is in subtitled Lakota dialect – but audiences loved it and it scooped seven Oscars. Rumour has it that the real-life Lakota have renamed their former hero Cares More About Bank Balance Than Multicultural Understanding since he extended a casino he owns onto land they claim is sacred.
Nobody could accuse Kevin of confusing his loyal fans with a fast-changing kaleidoscope of screen roles. Baseball’s his favourite: in Bull Durham, he played a minor-league catcher; in Field of Dreams, a farmer who turned his cornfield into a ballpark. In Tin Cup, refreshingly, he was a golfer, but in For the Love of the Game he’s a baseball player again – a once-great hero watching his career plummet. No extra research needed for that role, then.
The man who allegedly made all-American wholesomeness sexy has lost almost as much in paternity and divorce payouts as in box-office flops. One fling set him back $7m after a son ensued; his divorce after 16 years of marriage came amid rumours that he’d been fooling around with a hula dancer on the set of Waterworld. His wife, Cindy, made $80m – significantly more than some of Costner’s films did.
“I’m not that smart myself,” Costner has pointed out, as if anyone who’d seen him in The Bodyguard needed telling. But he’s set up his own technology company, Cinc, pioneering an engine Nasa has considered sending into space, and a technique for separating oil and water. “I could have cleaned up the Exxon Valdez spill in three days,” he said. Best not mention, then, the toxic paint used on the set of Waterworld that would have killed countless Hawaiian fish if it hadn’t been wisely removed.
For Waterworld, the Mad-Max-in-reverse tale set on a flooded earth, Costner built a $4m set off the Hawaiian coast featuring the wreck of the Exxon Valdez. It had to be dragged to the surface at a cost of $465 000 after it accidentally sank. The movie sank too, taking only $85m in the US and only recouping its $175m-plus price tag by doing passably well in Europe.
Costner planned to have Princess Diana star in Bodyguard 2. Asked to let Mikhail Gorbachev use his private jet for travel between California and Texas, he complained that he wasn’t a taxi service and said the former Soviet leader could come to dinner if he wanted to use his plane. He did.