Kurt Russell's first film role involved kicking Elvis, whom he later played
As a boy in his uncredited screen debut, Kurt Russell kicked Elvis Presley in the shin. In 1979 he played Elvis himself in a TV film directed by John Carpenter, earning an Emmy nomination and a partnership that produced some of the most enduring cult films of the 1980s.
Russell was born on March 17, 1951, in Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of actor Bing Russell and dancer Louise Russell, and grew up in Thousand Oaks, California, playing little league baseball. At 12 he landed the title role in the ABC Western The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters. In 1966 Walt Disney Productions signed him to a ten-year contract, and Walt Disney, in what proved his final filmed appearance before his death that December, predicted a great acting future for the 15-year-old. Russell became, in the words of the film historian Robert Osborne, the studio's top star of the 1970s, scoring a hit with The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. On one Disney set he met Goldie Hawn, who later became his partner.
The 1979 Elvis biopic launched his grown-up career. With Carpenter he went on to play the antihero Snake Plissken in Escape from New York, star in the horror film The Thing, based on John W. Campbell Jr.'s story Who Goes There?, and brawl through the comic fantasy Big Trouble in Little China. His turn in Mike Nichols's Silkwood brought a Golden Globe nomination.
The 1990s mixed genres freely: a firefighter in Backdraft, a colonel in the military science-fiction film Stargate, Wyatt Earp in the hit Western Tombstone, and a husband hunting his kidnapped wife in Breakdown. He even supplied Elvis's voice, uncredited, in Forrest Gump. Critics singled out his performance as the US Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks in Miracle in 2004, with Roger Ebert remarking that Russell did real acting there.
Later work leaned into franchises and auteurs. He played the killer Stuntman Mike in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof and appeared in two more Tarantino films, played the character Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, joined the Fast and Furious series as Mr. Nobody from 2015 and played Santa Claus in Netflix's The Christmas Chronicles.
Source: Kurt Russell
