American actor Kurt Vogel Russell was born on March 17, 1951 in Springfield, Massachusetts.
After getting his start as a child star in several movies for Walt Disney Studios, actor
Kurt Russell managed to shed his wholesome image to play some of cinema's most notorious
and hard-edged tough guys. He was named as one of the best actors never to have received
an Academy Award nomination by The Guardian.
Russell is the son of actor Bing Russell (1926–2003) and dancer Louise Julia Russell. He has three
sisters, Jill, Jamie and Jody.
Russell married actress Season Hubley in 1979, and had a son, Boston, born in February 1980.
After his divorce from Hubley in 1983, Russell began his relationship with Goldie Hawn. Russell
and Hawn have never married, stated that a "marriage certificate wasn’t going to create
anything that otherwise we wouldn’t have." They have a son, Wyatt Russell born in 1986
and Hawn's daughter with Bill Hudson, actress Kate Hudson, considers Russell to be her father.
Russell began acting on television at the age of 12 in the western series The Travels
of Jaimie McPheeters (1963–1964). In 1966, Russell was signed to a ten-year contract
with The Walt Disney Company, where he became the "studio's top star of the '70s". For Disney
he starred in Guns in the Heather (1969), The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1970), The
Barefoot Executive (1971) among many others. Russell first broke the Disney mold with an
acclaimed portrayal of the King in the made-for-television biopic, Elvis (1979), which many hailed as
one of the finest performances of his career and earned him an Emmy Award nomination. Having
partnered with director John Carpenter, he next essayed one of his most enduring characters,
Snake Plissken, the antihero of Carpenter's cult classic Escape from New York (1981).
He thrived throughout the 1980s with Big Trouble in Little China (1986) and Tequila Sunrise
(1988), which carried over into the next decades with Backdraft (1991), Stargate (1994) and
so on. He also appeared in The Fast and the Furious
franchise, having starred in Furious 7 (2015) and The Fate of the Furious (2017), as well
as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) in the role of Ego.
The five best movies starring Kurt Russell:
Escape from New York (1981), The Thing (1982), Backdraft (1991), Tombstone (1993), The Hateful
Eight (2015)
As of 2020, the actor has a net worth of $100 million.
Russell and Hawn own many homes in Canada and the United States. The couple listed their
very private and very homey Pacific Palisades mansion in LA for $6.9 million. The 6,389-square-foot
property has five bedrooms, including a double-level guest suite with soaring vaulted ceilings,
and five bathrooms. It is filled with spectacular skylights and hardwood floors, and the decor
is a blend of worldly bohemian and shabby-chic, California cool.
In 2003, Russell and partner Goldie Hawn bought an old mansion in Vancouver, Canada so that
their son could play hockey. Russell originally had his sights set on being
a professional baseball player. In 1971, he joined the Bend Rainbows and later played
for his father’s Mavericks. When a shoulder injury halted his athletic ambitions in 1973,
he began focusing on acting full-time. Russell is a hunter and a staunch supporter
of gun rights, and said that gun control will not reduce terrorism. He is also an FAA-licensed
private pilot holding single/multi-engine and instrument ratings, and is an Honorary
Council Member of the humanitarian aviation organization Wings of Hope.