Best Known As: Snake Plissken in the movie Escape From New York
Kurt Russell is a blue-eyed, square-jawed American actor best known for playing action heroes in the movies Escape From New York (1981), The Thing (1982) and Big Trouble in Little China (1986). Russell grew up in Hollywood; his dad was Bing Russell, a character actor on TV and a former baseball player and coach. Kurt began acting before he was ten, and by the age of 12 was playing the title character in the TV series The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (1963-64, with Charles Bronson). As a teenager Russell had a solid career on the big screen as the star of wholesome movies made by Disney, including Follow Me, Boys! (1966), The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit (1968) and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969). In the late 1970s he shifted his career focus to baseball. He played second base for three seasons in the minor leagues, but returned to the movie business in 1979 after injuries ended his baseball career. He got rave reviews for his starring role in the TV movie Elvis (1979), and in the 1980s got famous as a big-screen action hero. He also proved his versatility as an actor: He starred in Silkwood (1983, with Meryl Streep) and Tequila Sunrise (1988, with Mel Gibson); Swing Shift (1984, with Goldie Hawn) and Overboard (1987, also with Hawn); and The Mean Season (1985, with Andy Garcia) and The Best of Times (1986, with Robin Williams). Boyish and easy-going, Russell claims to make movies with a workingman's philosophy and no pretensions to art. He averages at least one feature film a year and has also appeared in Stargate (1994, with James Spader), Miracle (2004) and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse segment, Death Proof (2007, with Rose McGowan).
Russell and Hawn have been a couple since 1983 and are famously unmarried... From 1973-77 Russell's dad, Bing, owned the Portland Mavericks, an independent baseball team in the Class A Northwest League. Russell played for the Mavericks in 1973. Former Yankees pitcher and author Jim Bouton played for the Mavericks for part of the 1977 season.
"Sure I love Goldie. How could you not love Goldie? Everyone loves Goldie. I love her, and I hope our love will continue, but I don't want to give an I-love-Goldie-Hawn interview."
Career Highlights: Elvis, Escape from New York, The Thing
First Major Screen Credit: Gilligan's Island: Gilligan Meets Jungle Boy (1965)
Biography
One of the most iconic action stars of all time, Kurt Russell is among the few to make the successful transition from child star to successful adult actor. As a youth, Russell aspired to follow the footsteps of his father, Bing Russell, who, in addition to being a big league baseball player, was also an actor (he was perhaps best known for his role as the sheriff on the TV Western Bonanza). That his heroes Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris did the same thing only strengthened Russell's resolve to have both a baseball and acting career.
He first broke into acting on television, starring in the series The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, and he made his film debut playing the boy who kicks Elvis in the 1963 Elvis Presley vehicle It Happened at the World's Fair.
After signing a ten-year contract with Disney, Russell got his big break as a juvenile actor in 1966, starring opposite Fred MacMurray in Disney's live-action feature Follow Me Boys! His association with the studio lasted through 1975, and produced such comedic family movies as The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit (1968), The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969), The Barefoot Executive (1971), and The Strongest Man in the World (1975). The last film marked Russell's final collaboration with Disney, aside from his voicing the character of Copper in the studio's The Fox and the Hound (1981). Still an avid baseball enthusiast during those years, Russell nurtured his dreams of becoming a professional ball player until a shoulder injury permanently changed his plans.
After ending his association with Disney, Russell disappeared from features for a few years. He appeared in a few television movies, most notably playing the title role in Elvis, John Carpenter's made-for-television biopic. His next role as a sleazy used car salesman in Robert Zemeckis' hilariously caustic Used Cars (1980) allowed him to counter his wholesome, all-American nice guy image, and prove that he was an actor of untapped range. Director Carpenter recognized this and cast Russell as ruthless mercenary Snake Plissken in his brooding sci-fi/action film Escape From New York (1981). The role would prove to be one of legendary status, and one that would cement Russell as a cult hero for generations to come. Carpenter also cast Russell as a scientist stranded in the Antarctic in his chilling 1982 remake of The Thing. Realizing that his characters were larger than life, Russell typically played them with a subtle tongue- in-cheek quality. He also used this comic intuition in comedies like 1987's Overboard, in which he starred alongside his long-time life-partner and mother of his child Golide Hawn.
In 1983, Russell moved to serious drama, playing opposite Cher and Meryl Streep in Silkwood. The success of that film helped him break into a more mainstream arena, and he was later able to win praise for his dramatic work in such films as Swing Shift (1984), Tequila Sunrise (1988), and Winter People (1989). However, it is with his performances in action films that Russell remains most widely associated. He has appeared in a number of such films, all of disparate quality. Some of Russell's more memorable projects include Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Tango and Cash (1989), Backdraft (1991), Tombstone (1993), and Executive Decision (1996). In 1996, he reprised his Snake Plissken character for Carpenter's Escape From L.A. The following year, he starred opposite Kathleen Quinlan in the revenge thriller Breakdown before returning to the sci-fi/action realm with Soldier in 1998. It would be two years before movie-going audiences would again catch a glimpse of Russell, though with his roles in 2000 Miles to Graceland (again carrying on the Elvis associations that have haunted his career) and Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky, the versatile actor proved that he was still very much on the scene. Is some of Russell's later day roles had stressed the action angle a bit more than the more dramatic aspects of the stories, the release of Dark Blue in 2003 combined both with Russell cast as a volitile police officer tracking a killer against the backdrop of the 1992 L.A. riots.
In 2005, Russell played a frustrated father and horse-man in Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, showing audiences that for all his on-screen bombast, he still had a sensitive side. He quickly leapt back into the action-packed saddle, however, with a leading role in 2006's remake of The Poseidon Adventure, Poseidon. Soon afterward, he accepted a role that took a decidedly self-aware perspective on his own fame as an over-the-top action star as he signed on for the leading role in Death Proof, Quinten Tarantino's half of the double-feature Grindhouse. A tribute to the fantastically violent B-exploitation films of its title, Grindhouse would cast Russell as Stuntman Mike, a literal lady-killer with a car that can be crashed and smashed without ever allowing the driver to be hurt.
Russell was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, a descendant of William Russell and Martha Davies, who came to MA from England c. 1640 and settled in what is now Arlington, MA.[citation needed] He is the son of Louise Julia (née Crone), a dancer, and Bing Russell, a character actor known as Deputy Clem Foster on Bonanza.[1] Russell considers Rangeley, Maine, to be his hometown.[2] In the mid-sixties, Russell graduated from Thousand Oaks High School in Thousand Oaks, California.
Career
Russell began his career with an appearance as a child in the pilot of the ABCwestern television series Sugarfoot with Will Hutchins. His film career began at the age of eleven in an uncredited part as "Ugly Child" in Elvis Presley's It Happened at the World's Fair and two extra episodes, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the then defunct series 'Rin Tin Tin. On April 24, 1963, Russell guest starred in the ABC series Our Man Higgins, starring Stanley Holloway as an English butler in an American family. He appeared in 1963 as Peter Hall in the episode "Everybody Knows You Left Me" on the NBCmedical drama about psychiatryThe Eleventh Hour.
In the autumn of 1976, Russell appeared with Tim Matheson in the 15-episode NBC series The Quest, the story of two young men in the American West seeking the whereabouts of their sister, a captive of the Cheyenne.
Russell, like his father before him, had a baseball career. In the early 1970s, Russell played second base for the California Angels' (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim) Double-A minor league affiliate, the El Paso Sun Kings. During a play, he was hit in the shoulder by a player running to second base; the collision tore the rotator cuff in Russell's right/throwing shoulder. Before his injury, he was leading the Texas League in hitting, with a .563 batting average. The injury forced his retirement from baseball in 1973 and led to his return to acting.
In 1979, Russell was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or a Special for the made-for-television film Elvis. This would be his first pairing with John Carpenter, the director of Halloween. Although Russell did not perform the singing vocals in the series - which were provided by country music artist Ronnie McDowell - he would later go on to provide the voice of Elvis Presley in the 1994 film Forrest Gump. Over the next decade, Russell would team with Carpenter several times, helping create some of his best-known roles, usually as anti-heroes, including the infamous Snake Plissken of Escape from New York and its sequel, Escape from L.A.. Among their collaborations was 1982's John Carpenter's The Thing, based upon the short story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr., which had been interpreted on film before, albeit loosely, in 1951's The Thing from Another World. In 1986, the two made Big Trouble in Little China, a dark kung-fu comedy/action film in which Russell played a truck driver caught in an ancient Chinese war. While the film was a financial failure like The Thing, it has since gained a cult audience.
Elvis Presley has had a presence in his career. Aside from appearing as a child in one of Presley's films and giving a convincing portrayal of the singer in the 1979 television biopic, Russell starred as an Elvis impersonator involved in a Las Vegas robbery in 3000 Miles to Graceland and provided the voice of Elvis for a scene in Forrest Gump.
He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture for his performance opposite Meryl Streep in the 1984 film, Silkwood. His portrayal of U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks in the film, Miracle, won the praise of critics. "In many ways," wrote Claudia Puig of USA Today, "Miracle belongs to Kurt Russell." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times wrote, "Russell does real acting here." Elvis Mitchell of the The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Russell's cagey and remote performance gives Miracle its few breezes of fresh, albeit methane-scented, air." (Mitchell's use of the word "remote" here is not a criticism of Russell's acting so much as a description of Russell's portrait of an emotionally reserved man.)[citation needed]
In 2006, Russell revealed that he was the director of Tombstone, not George P. Cosmatos, as credited.[4] According to Russell, Cosmatos was recommended by Sylvester Stallone and was, in effect, a ghost director, much as he had been for Rambo: First Blood Part II. Russell said he promised Cosmatos he would keep it a secret as long as Cosmatos was alive; Cosmatos died in April 2005.[4] Russell owns the rights to the masters and makes reference to possibly re-editing the film, as he was not originally involved in the editing.[4]
Russell appeared as villain Stuntman Mike in Quentin Tarantino's segment Death Proof of the film Grindhouse. After a remake of Escape from New York was announced, Russell was reportedly upset with the casting of Gerard Butler for his signature character, Snake Plissken, as he believed the character 'was quintessentially [...] American.'[5][6]
Russell in 2005
Personal life
Russell married actress Season Hubley, whom he had met on the set of Elvis in 1979 and they had a son, Boston Russell, in 1980. In 1983, in the middle of his divorce from Hubley, Russell re-connected with Goldie Hawn on the set of the film Swing Shift and they have been in a relationship ever since. They had a son, Wyatt, in 1986. The couple filmed the comedy Overboard together in 1987. Hawn's son and daughter with Bill Hudson, actors Oliver and Kate Hudson, consider Russell to be their father. Russell is the uncle of former Major League Baseball player Matt Franco.
Russell is a prominent member of the Libertarian Party. He claims that he was often an outcast in Hollywood because of his libertarian views, so he and Hawn moved to an area outside Aspen, Colorado where he has tried his hand at writing (he co-wrote the screenplay for Escape from L.A.). In February 2003, Russell and Hawn moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, so that their son could play hockey. Russell is an FAA licensed private pilot holding single/multi-engine and instrument ratings.
