Guardian Angel

Date: January 14, 1993
By Whittaker P

From Herald Sun
Submitted by: Larry A.


In just a few years, Kevin Costner has gone from emptying trash bins at a movie studio to putting Academy Award-winning films in the can.

But despite his star status as one of Hollywood's sexiest and most bankable leading men, Costner has provided precious little tabloid fare during his short but remarkable film career.

A devoted husband and family man, he has been married to Cindy for 13 years and still lives in the same house as when he was an aspiring actor.

In his new romantic thriller, The Bodyguard, the 37-year-old actor-director is Whitney Houston's fearless protector.

The Bodyguard has received mixed reviews, but Costner seems to be bulletproof at the box office.

The film has taken more than $90 million in its first month.

Costner is Frank Farmer, a former Secret Service agent turned professional bodyguard.

The film is 29-year-old Houston's first venture into movies. She plays a singer-actress being stalked by a killer, with Costner hired as her bodyguard despite her objections.

Their relationship evolves from being confrontational to romantic.

What does Houston think about Costner? "He's really just like a home boy, you know? What evolved was a great friendship and nothing more," she says.

Even when Costner first suggested the project in 1988, he envisaged Houston as its female star.

"There is just an abundance of talent in this woman," he says.

Houston says: "I'd heard that Kevin wanted me for the part and that he was prepared to wait however long it took for me to be available to do it.

"Let me tell you, that was tripping me out. I thought: 'Why does this man want me so bad?' "Then I read the script and I understood why.

"Rachel's a great singer, a good actress, she's up for an Academy Award, she's hot - everyone loves Rachel. And I could relate to that because it's been that way for me in my career." The subject matter - an obsessed fan stalking a star - was chillingly realistic for Houston. "I've been threatened, she says."People love you to death, if you know what I mean."

Costner, a father of three, has no minders of his own, not even a publicist.

He'd rather stay home with his wife and children - Annie, aged seven, Lily, five, and Joel, three - than frequent the Hollywood social scene.

And he tries to protect his family from the media glare and live by the down-to-earth values his father taught him.

His gross earnings last year are estimated at $75 million, but Costner and the wife he met in college have lived in the same house for 11 years.

It's true that the house now has a wall around it and an outdoor basketball court with night-lights, but it remains the main base of operations for the Costner clan, which enjoys family horseback-riding and camping outings.

Costner and his wife, Cindy, run their errands, not in a Mercedes-Benz, as one may expect, but in a four-wheel-drive Bronco.

He still gets a kick remembering when the couple called their neighbors to come and take pictures of them the first time a studio limousine pulled up in front of the house.

And how he called his parents when he was in a Concorde. "I want my kids to enjoy the kind of family life I had as a kid - hunting and fishing with my parents," he says.

The Costner clan is never far apart. Kevin's parents lived in a motor home during the filming of Dances with Wolves, and followed the production from location to location.

During the making of Oliver Stone's JFK, the family rented a 10-room mansion in New Orleans.

"I still talk to my dad nearly every day," Costner says. "Dad was my best teacher. He taught me about loyalty and friendship and doing my best." In the five years since The Untouchables, Costner has emerged as one of the world's leading movie stars.But he didn't consider acting until his final year of business management at California State University when, bored and restless, he noticed a casting call for a campus production of Rumpelstiltskin.

He lost the audition but became enamored with acting. "I told my wife that we were going to Hollywood and that if I had to get a job taking trash out, it was going to be movie trash," he says.

Costner talked himself into a low-level administration job at a small studio and, after three years, he was cast in the 1983 film Frances, getting a small part in several scenes with the film's star, Jessica Lange.

Costner played the scenes, and all of them ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Soon after it happened again. Lawrence Kasdan offered him the part of Alex in The Big Chill. But when none of the flashback scenes he shot appeared in the movie, he became famous all over town as the actor who had never been seen.

Kasdan made it up to Costner by offering him the part of a rambunctious gunslinger in the 1985 western Silverado, which caught the critics' eye.

In 1987 he reached stardom as Eliot Ness in The Untouchables and as a double-agent in the Pentagon thriller No Way Out.

Rumors have linked him and his leading ladies, and there were reports of marital rifts.

"We have our ups and downs, like everyone else," he says.

The Bodyguard calls for Costner and Houston to fall in love.

Houston says: "There are love scenes and we do become intimate, but more than that it's about a relationship that develops into a friendship." Costner left the couple's steamiest love scenes on the cutting-room floor.

"The sex scenes we removed were really out of keeping with the tone of the movie, which is much sweeter," Costner says.

"This is still the ultimate make-out movie."