The knives have long been out for Kevin Costner, but as Donald Clarke finds out, he has a knack of disarming you with his Gary Cooper-like persona
For about a decade, Kevin Costner has served as a useful figure of fun for journalists who, in his own words, "view criticism as a form of entertainment". Since 1995's Waterworld - a baggy, dystopian fantasy directed by Kevin Reynolds with, it was reported, a great deal of help from his leading actor - ran up the sort of production costs that could finance a small war, some in the media have taken any opportunity to poke fun at him.
The knives had been sharpened after his notorious cameo in the 1991 documentary, In Bed With Madonna. Dropping backstage to congratulate the singer, he made the unforgivable error of describing her searingly radical, sexually transgressive performance as "neat". Madonna snorted with laughter and the world did too. How dare he behave like he stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting? This clean-cut, slightly over-serious, blue collar star was, the moment his career faltered, doomed to get it in the neck from facetious, smart-ass writers who like nothing better than to strip away hard-won reputations. Writers like me, in other words.
"I think there was a little bit of ganging up," he says. Certain journalists got very lazy. Because one journalist said something they all said it. When they were all ganging up, I wondered who was going to stand up for me."
Costner has a knack of inadvertently making you feel like a bit of a heel. Wearing a tank-top and chinos, his hair slightly thinning, he comes across as open, friendly and down-to-earth. Ludicrous as it sounds, he really does appear to carry himself like a suburban version of Gary Cooper.
Indeed, there seems to be surprisingly little daylight between the real Costner and the various all-American guys he has played in films such as Bull Durham, The Untouchables, JFK and Dances With Wolves.
His latest film, Open Range, Costner's third as director, finds the star appearing as yet another laid-back, morally upstanding hero. In this reassuringly traditional, mostly delightful western, he plays one of four cowhands who, under the leadership of a splendid Robert Duvall, fall foul of a savage Irish hoodlum played by Michael Gambon. Following Silverado, Wyatt Earp and Dances With Wolves, this is his fourth western. They don't make cowboy pictures much any more, but when they do they tend to star Costner.
"Well they are hard to make," he says. "And there really are very few good ones. There are really only 10 or 15 westerns that I have liked throughout my life. The rest of them were mostly rubbish."
Considering the perception of Costner as a man driven by comforting, old-fashioned values, there are few stars who could carry off the traditional western hero as confidently. Most of his contemporaries would surely bring too much ironic baggage. Previous interviews suggest that he thinks very similarly to Duvall's character in Open Range, a craggy veteran who does not enjoy violence, but who accepts it as a necessary part of life.
"I agree with that. But then I think that most men agree with that. I think most women agree with that. Movies are set up so that you can see heroism on the grandest scale. You can watch those moments and think: maybe I can be that brave in my own life."
Ron Shelton, who directed Costner in Bull Durham, has said that both men learned these sort of uncomplicated values growing up in humble surroundings while attending tough state schools.
"Yeah, we are both public school guys. We lived our lives on a playground where if you behaved in a way that wasn't fair you might have some kid put you up against a chain-link fence. You got to play fair if you come from there. I rode in a helicopter the other day and I have to tell you I am still impressed with that sort of thing. And I knew that somebody had to be thanked for it."
He has three children by his first marriage to - wouldn't you know it? - childhood sweetheart, Cindy Silva. They must have enjoyed a very different adolescence to the one he went through?.
"It is more difficult for my children to learn the value of things. When I had a basketball and I let it go flat or get stolen I didn't get another one; I got a talking to. They can just get another one. You don't want to bring your children back to that. You love them and you want to give them stuff. But you also want them to learn the value of things."
Costner was born in Lynwood, California, in 1955 to a father who worked his way from being a ditch digger to a technician at the electricity utility, Southern California Edison. An active youth, who spent his formative years playing sports, writing poetry and building his own canoe, Costner graduated from California State University with a degree in marketing. During his time at college, he had taken acting classes and, following a chance meeting with Richard Burton on a plane, decided, with characteristic determination, to turn himself into a movie star.
It was a slog. He briefly dabbled in the softest of pornography and had small parts in Frances (1982) and Table for Five (1983), before eventually securing what he thought was his big break when he was cast in Lawrence Kasdan's 1983 comedy, The Big Chill. Sadly, he then became the answer to a popular movie trivia question when his role as the charismatic Alex, whose death reunites a group of old friends, was cut from the movie.
It was another two years before his career kicked back into gear. In 1985, he appeared in Kevin Reynolds's so-so Fandango and Kasdan's enjoyable Silverado. Then came The Untouchables, Field of Dreams and, in 1990, his first film as director, Dances With Wolves, a hearty epic that all Hollywood expected to flop, but which made a fortune and garnered him an Oscar for best director.
"I went seven years without making anything, so when my career did finally start to move, I knew where I was going. I quickly went from Fandango to The Untouchables to Bull Durham and Field of Dreams and then directed Dances. I knew what I wanted to do. I always had it in my mind always where I was going."
It has been suggested that this relentless focus and unshakable determination has sometimes been his undoing. It is true that less forceful personalities may have given up on Dances With Wolves. Then again, less forceful personalities may have given up on the turgid Waterworld, which is allegedly as much his work as Reynolds's.
"Everyone ran from the movie and I knew that was wrong," he says. "The only person who had a legitimate reason to step away from that film was Kevin Reynolds because there were people who were trying to make a different film from the one he wanted to make. So the film fell on to me. The easy thing to do was say: 'This isn't my problem, I did my best as an actor,' and leave it. But I went round the world and supported it."
Worse was to follow. Whereas Waterworld did eventually claw its way into profit, The Postman, a Costner-directed, overlong, ruinously expensive vision of the future, bombed spectacularly and was named by many critics as the worst film of 1997.
Since then, the roles have not been so good and the press have turned on him. He is unquestionably no longer the force he was.
But, like Gary Cooper, he is not really the moaning type. After all, his personal life is in good shape. This summer he will marry his girlfriend of five years, Christine Baumgartner, on his estate in Aspen (Silva and he divorced in 1994). What took him so long to pop the question? "Well, when you come out of a first love it is hard. It is really odd for me that somebody can come out of a long relationship and then suddenly be on the arm of another person. That is not the signal I wanted to give to my children: I was with her, now I am with her, and next week I'll be with someone else. I had to make sure I was going to do this right." Costner asks if I am now or ever have been married (I'm not and I haven't). He laughs heartily.
"And here you were saying that I should hurry up and get married. You said that to me and I thought that was a bit of sage advice and then it turns out you haven't been married. Get on with it man!"
And he gives me a warm handshake. What a guy. Next time I make fun of him I will really, really feel like a heel.
Open Range is on general release