Kevin Kline Kevin Delaney Kline is an American stage and
film actor.
He has won an Academy Award and two Tony Awards.
He is also a 2003 American Theatre Hall of Fame inductee.
Kline began his career on stage in 1972 with The Acting Company.
He went on to win two Tony Awards for his work in Broadway musicals, winning Best Featured
Actor in a Musical for the 1978 original production of On the Twentieth Century and Best Actor
in a Musical for the 1981 revival of The Pirates of Penzance.
His other stage roles include Falstaff in the 2003 Broadway production of Henry IV,
for which he won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play.
He made his film debut in 1982, opposite Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice.
For his role in the 1988 comedy hit A Fish Called Wanda, he won the Academy Award for
Best Supporting Actor.
He has also been nominated for an Emmy Award, two BAFTA Awards and five Golden Globe Awards.
His other films include The Big Chill (1983), Cry Freedom (1987), Dave (1993), The Ice Storm
(1997), In & Out (1997) and De-Lovely (2004).
Early life Kline was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the
son of Margaret and Robert Joseph Kline.
His father was a classical music lover and an amateur opera singer who owned and operated
The Record Bar, a record store in St. Louis that opened in the early 1940s, and sold toys
during the 1960s and 1970s; his father's family also owned Kline's Inc., a department store
chain.
Kline has described his mother as the "dramatic theatrical character in our family."
Kline's father was Jewish, from a family that had emigrated from Germany; Kline's mother
was of Irish descent, the daughter of an emigrant from County Louth.
Kline was raised in his mother's Catholic religion (his father had become an agnostic).
He has three siblings, Alex, Christopher, and Kate.
Kline graduated from the Catholic Saint Louis Priory School in 1965; in 1997, the school
named its new auditorium the Kevin Kline Theater, and Kline did a benefit performance of selections
from Shakespeare at the dedication.
He attended Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he began as an aspiring classical
pianist.
After joining the on-campus theater group "Vest Pocket Players" as an undergraduate,
he fell in love with the theater and switched to acting, graduating from IU in 1970.
Career In 1970, Kline was awarded a scholarship to
the newly formed Drama Division at the Juilliard School in New York.
In 1972, he joined with fellow Juilliard graduates, including Patti LuPone and David Ogden Stiers,
and formed the City Center Acting Company (now The Acting Company), under the aegis
of John Houseman.
The Company traveled across the U.S. performing Shakespeare's plays, other classical works,
and the musical The Robber Bridegroom, founding one of the most widely praised groups in American
repertory theatre.
In 1976, Kline left The Acting Company and settled in New York City, doing a brief appearance
as the character "Woody Reed" in the now-defunct soap opera Search for Tomorrow.
He followed this with a return to the stage in 1977 to play Clym Yeobright opposite Donna
Theodore as Eustacia Vye in The Hudson Guild Theater production of Dance on a Country Grave,
Kelly Hamilton's musical version of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native.
In 1978 he played the role of Bruce Granit, a matinée idol caricature, in Harold Prince's
On the Twentieth Century, for which he won his first Tony Award.
In 1981, Kline appeared with rock diva Linda Ronstadt and singer Rex Smith in the New York
Shakespeare Festival's Central Park production of The Pirates of Penzance, winning another
Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical, for his comically dashing portrayal of the
Pirate King.
In 1983, he played the role in a film version of the musical, also with Ronstadt, Smith
and Angela Lansbury, which had a limited theatrical release.
In the ensuing years, Kline appeared many times in New York Shakespeare Festival productions
of Shakespeare, including starring roles in Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry
V, two productions of Hamlet (one of which he also directed) and a Tony-nominated Falstaff
in a production that combined the two parts of Henry IV.
Dubbed "the American Olivier" by New York Times theater critic Frank Rich for his stage
acting, Kline finally ventured into film in 1982 in Alan J. Pakula's Sophie's Choice.
He won the coveted role of the tormented and mercurial Nathan opposite Meryl Streep.
Streep won an Academy Award for her performance in the film.
Kline was nominated for a Golden Globe and BAFTA Award for best debut performance.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Kline made several films with director Lawrence Kasdan,
including The Big Chill, Silverado, Grand Canyon, I Love You to Death, and French Kiss.
In 1989, Kline won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the British
comedy A Fish Called Wanda, in which he played a painfully inept American ex-CIA thug opposite
John Cleese's genteel British barrister and Jamie Lee Curtis' femme fatale/con woman.
In 2000, the American Film Institute ranked the film twenty-first on AFI's 100 Years...
100 Laughs.
Though he has been offered many roles that could have boosted him to box-office stardom,
Kline has kept a wary distance from the Hollywood star-making machine.
He developed a reputation for picking parts with discrimination (such as strong roles
in Grand Canyon and Life as a House), leading to the industry nickname "Kevin Decline".
Other awards have included Drama Desk Awards, Golden Globe awards, a Gotham Award, a Hasty
Pudding Theatricals Man of the Year Award, and a St. Louis International Film Festival
Lifetime Achievement Award.
He was inducted in the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 2003.
He also has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
Film reviewers have widely praised his talent.
Newsday said Kline "has proved himself to be one of the most talented and versatile
American actors of his generation."
He played the title role in King Lear at the Public Theater, and took the lead role in
a Broadway production of Cyrano de Bergerac opposite Jennifer Garner.
That production was forced to close temporarily after only 11 performances as a result of
the Broadway stagehands' strike, but subsequently reopened.
Cyrano was filmed in 2008 and aired as part of PBS's Great Performances series in January
2009.
In January 2008, Kline won a Screen Actors Guild award for his portrayal of Jaques in
Kenneth Branagh's film As You Like It, adapted from Shakespeare's play.
The film premiered theatrically in 2006 in Europe.
It bypassed theatres and was sent straight to HBO in the U.S. Kline's film The Conspirator
premiered during the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010 and was described as
an "old fashioned historical thriller".
It was well received by most critics.
Kline also starred in the 2012 comedy Darling Companion alongside Diane Keaton.
In December 2004 Kline became the 2,272nd recipient of a star on Hollywood Walk of Fame,
located at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard.
Personal life Throughout the 1970s, Kline was involved in
a long-term relationship with his Juilliard classmate Patti LuPone.
They separated and reconnected many times before finally ending their relationship in
1978.
Their relationship is precisely detailed in LuPone's memoir, Patti LuPone: A Memoir.
Kline married actress Phoebe Cates in 1989.
The couple live in New York City and they have two children, including a daughter, Greta,
a musician currently performing as Frankie Cosmos.
After his son was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, Kline became active with the Juvenile
Diabetes Research Foundation.
In November 2004, he was presented with the JDRF's Humanitarian of the Year award by Meryl
Streep for his volunteer efforts on behalf of the organization.
The Kevin Kline Awards honor theatre professionals in St. Louis in a wide array of categories,
which include best actor and actress, set design, choreography, and original play.
The first awards ceremony took place on March 20, 2006.
Awards and nominations