Trivia: One of Hollywood's most prominent strong, silent types, Kevin Costner was for several years the celluloid personification of the baseball industry, given his indelible mark with baseball-themed hits like Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, and For Love of the Game. His epic Western Dances with Wolves marked the first break from this trend and established Costner as a formidable directing talent to boot. Although several flops in the late '90s diminished his bankability, for many, Costner remained one of the industry's most enduring and endearing icons.A native of California, Costner was born January 18, 1955, in Lynnwood. While a marketing student at California State University in Fullerton, he became involved with community theater. Upon graduation in 1978, Costner took a marketing job that lasted all of 30 days before deciding to take a crack at acting. After an inauspicious 1974 film debut in the ultra-cheapie Sizzle Beach USA, Costner decided to take a more serious approach to acting. Venturing down the usual theater-workshop, multiple-audition route, the actor impressed casting directors who weren't really certain of how to use him. That may be one reason why Costner's big-studio debut in Night Shift (1982) consisted of little more than background decoration, and the same year's Frances featured the hapless young actor as an off-stage voice.Director Lawrence Kasdan liked Costner enough to cast him in the important role of the suicide victim who motivated the plot of The Big Chill (1983). Unfortunately, his flashback scenes were edited out of the movie, leaving all that was visible of the actor -- who had turned down Matthew Broderick's role in WarGames to take the part -- to be his dress suit, along with a fleeting glimpse of his hairline and hands as the undertaker prepared him for burial during the opening credits. Two years later, a guilt-ridden Kasdan chose Costner for a major part as a hell-raising gunfighter in the "retro" Western Silverado (1985), this time putting him in front of the camera for virtually the entire film. He also gained notice for the Diner-ish buddy road movie Fandango. The actor's big break came two years later as he burst onto the screen in two major films, No Way Out and The Untouchables; his growing popularity was further amplified with a brace of baseball films, released within months of one another. In Bull Durham (1988), the actor was taciturn minor-league ballplayer Crash Davis, and in the following year's Field of Dreams he was Ray Kinsella, a farmer who constructs a baseball diamond in his Iowa cornfield at the repeated urging of a voice that intones "if you build it, he will come."Riding high on the combined box-office success of these films, Costner was able to make his directing debut. With a small budget of 18 million dollars, he went off to the Black Hills of South Dakota to film the first Western epic that Hollywood had seen in years, a revisionist look at American Indian-white relationships titled Dances With Wolves (1990). The supposedly doomed project, in addition to being one of '90s biggest moneymakers, also took home a slew of Academy Awards, including statues for Best Picture and Best Director (usurping Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas).Costner's luck continued with the 1991 costume epic Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves; this, too, made money, though it seriously strained Costner's longtime friendship with the film's director, Kevin Reynolds. The same year, Costner had another hit -- and critical success -- on his hands with Oliver Stone's JFK. The next year's The Bodyguard, a film which teamed Costner with Whitney Houston, did so well at the box office that it seemed the actor could do no wrong. However, his next film, A Perfect World (1993), directed by Clint Eastwood and casting the actor against type as a half-psycho, half-benign prison escapee, was a major disappointment, even though Costner himself garnered some acclaim. Bad luck followed Perfect World in the form of another cast-against-type failure, the 1994 Western Wyatt Earp, which proved that Lawrence Kasdan could have his off days.Adding insult to injury, Costner's 1995 epic sci-fi adventure Waterworld received a whopping amount of negative publicity prior to opening due to its ballooning budget and bloated schedule; ultimately, its decent box office total in no way offset its cost. The following year, Costner was able to rebound somewhat with the romantic comedy Tin Cup, which was well-received by the critics and the public alike. Unfortunately, he opted to follow up this success with another large-scaled directorial effort, an epic filmization of author David Brin's The Postman. The 1997 film featured Costner as a Shakespeare-spouting drifter in a post-nuclear holocaust America whose efforts to reunite the country give him messianic qualities. Like Waterworld, The Postman received a critical drubbing and did poorly with audiences. Costner's reputation, now at an all-time low, received some resuscitation with the 1998 romantic drama Message in a Bottle, and later the same year he returned to the genre that loved him best with Sam Raimi's baseball drama For Love of the Game. A thoughtful reflection on the Cuban missile crisis provided the groundwork for the mid-level success Thirteen Days (2000), though Costner's next turn -- as a member of a group of Elvis impersonating casino bandits in 3000 Miles to Graceland -- drew harsh criticism, relegating it to a quick death at the box office. Though Costner's next effort was a more sentimental supernatural drama lamenting lost love, Dragonfly (2002) was dismissed by many as a cheap clone of The Sixth Sense and met an almost equally hasty fate.Costner fared better in 2003, and returned to directing, with Open Range, a Western co-starring himself and the iconic Robert Duvall -- while it was no Dances With Wolves in terms of mainstream popularity, it certainly received more positive feedback than The Postman or Waterworld. In 2004, Costner starred alongside Joan Allen in director Mike Binder's drama The Upside of Anger. That picture cast Allen as an unexpectedly single, upper-middle class woman who unexpectedly strikes up a romance with the boozy ex-baseball star who lives next door (Costner). Even if divided on the picture as a whole, critics unanimously praised the lead performances by Costner and Allen.After the thoroughly dispiriting (and critically drubbed) quasi-sequel to The Graduate, Rumor Has It..., Costner teamed up with Fugitive director Andrew Davis for the moderately successful 2006 Coast Guard thriller The Guardian, co-starring Ashton Kutcher and Hollywood ingenue Melissa Sagemiller.Costner then undertook another change-of-pace with one of his first psychological thrillers: 2007's Mr. Brooks, directed by Bruce A. Evans. Playing a psychotic criminal spurred on to macabre acts by his homicidal alter ego (William Hurt), Costner emerged from the critical- and box-office failure fairly unscathed. He came back swinging the following year with a starring role in the comedy Swing Vote, playing a small town slacker whose single vote is about to determine the outcome of a presidential election. Costner's usual everyman charm carried the movie, but soon he was back to his more somber side, starring in the recession-era drama The Company Men in 2010 alongside Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones. As the 2010's rolled on, Costner's name appeared often in conjunction with the Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained prior to filming, but scheduling conflicts would eventually prevent the actor from participating in the project. He instead signed on for the latest Superman reboot, playing Clark Kent's adoptive dad on Planet Earth in Man of Steel.

Trivia: Wes Bentley was a relative newcomer to film when he starred in Sam Mendes' American Beauty (1999), but his haunting portrayal of the battered, enigmatic Ricky Fitts made him one of the most talked about young actors of the year. Dark, lanky, and possessing a pair of blue eyes of diamond-cutting intensity, Bentley beat out 20 young Hollywood actors for the role (according to Mendes), and his breakthrough performance was soon generating Oscar buzz. The actor originally hailed from Jonesboro, AR, where he was tormented by school bullies for being a "pretty boy," and he came to film via New York's Juilliard School, where he acted in a number of productions. While in New York, Bentley also sought other work, and an open casting call for Rent led to a casting director's request for him to do some reading for a small film. Prior to American Beauty, Bentley's film experience had been limited to roles in independent films such as Three Below Zero and Halfway to Pleasantville, and a small part in Jonathan Demme's Beloved. Following his acclaimed role in American Beauty, Bentley appeared in The White River Kid, in which he played the film's titular murderer.In the wake of American Beauty, Bentley starred in Michael Winterbottom's The Claim, as well as yet another version of the classic adventure tale The Four Feathers. He was away from screens for three years at that point, but returned in 2005's The Game of Their Lives and continued to work steadily in a variety of projects including Ghost Rider and Jonah Hex. He scored his most high-profile role since American Beauty in 2012 when he played the part of Seneca Crane, the elaborately bearded game-master in The Hunger Games. He played a supporting role in Christopher Nolan's outerspace epic Interstellar in 2014.

Trivia: Actress Kelly Reilly grew up in a working-class neighborhood in London. Too timid to voice her desires to study drama, she learned about acting the hard way, plunging into a professional career and picking up as much as she could along the way. She began picking up small roles on British television and regularly worked throughout the next decade before she began snatching up roles in higher profile projects like 2005's Pride & Prejudice and Mrs. Henderson Presents.

Trivia: Grew up in a devoutly religious family in Dayton, OH, where his father is a Pentecostal minister; learned to play the drums in church. One of first auditions in Hollywood was for the title role in the 2005 CBS biopic Elvis, which ultimately went to Jonathan Rhys Meyers. In 2007, started playing drums for the rock band Mitchells Folly, who released their debut album, Whirlwind, in 2008. At the 2008 Breckenridge Festival of Film, shared a Best Supporting Actor Award with costar Dan McCabe for War Eagle, Arkansas. His competition for the buzzed-about role of Ryan Lafferty on ABC's Brothers & Sisters included actors Jason Ritter and Scott Porter.

Trivia: The overwhelmingly genial, dark-haired American actor Dave Annable gained recognition in the mid-2000s for his high-profile involvement in two series. As one of his first assignments, Annable signed on as one of the lead characters, Aaron, in the drama/murder mystery series Reunion (2005). The program explored occurrences in the lives of six former high school friends from 1986 through 2006, and recounted events leading up to the murder of one of the major characters, or at least it was supposed to. Unfortunately, it folded not long after it premiered -- the victim of low ratings -- so the story was only revealed through the year 1994, the ninth episode. Annable fared infinitely better (yet received slightly lower billing) on the prime-time ensemble drama Brothers & Sisters, starring Sally Field, Calista Flockhart, Rachel Griffiths, and Balthazar Getty. That series concerned the trials and travails befalling one extended California family; Annable played Justin, a psychologically damaged Afghan war veteran with drug problems. Brothers & Sisters encountered mediocre reviews on par with Reunion when it premiered in September 2006, but drew favorable ratings, presumably thanks in no small part to that cast, and it continued on for five seasons. After the show finished its run in 2011, Annable appeared in the Anna Faris comedy What's Your Number. He next starred on two short-lived series, 666 Park Avenue and Red Band Society.

Trivia: After making his film debut alongside a cast of future stars, Cole Hauser made his own mark as a TV and indie film actor in the 1990s. Raised in Santa Barbara, Hauser got hooked on acting in junior high. Shortly after he moved to Los Angeles at age 15 to pursue his chosen career, Hauser was cast in the prep school anti-Semitism drama School Ties (1992) along with up-and-comers Brendan Fraser, Chris O'Donnell, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck. After this auspicious beginning, Hauser became part of an equally noteworthy ensemble of young stars-to-be in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993), appeared in the NBC TV movie A Matter of Justice (1993), played a skinhead in John Singleton's college drama Higher Learning (1995), and starred as an abusive boyfriend in All Over Me (1997). Hauser was cast in the lead role in the ABC series High Incident in 1996, but the show lasted only two seasons. Following a supporting role as one of Damon and Affleck's Boston cronies in their breakthrough hit Good Will Hunting (1997), Hauser played a small part in Stephen Frears' little seen modern Western The Hi-Lo Country (1998) and scored a hit as one of the marooned travelers battling mutant aliens in the sci-fi sleeper Pitch Black (2000). After reuniting with his Tigerland (2000) co-star Colin Farrell in the box office failure Hart's War (2002), Hauser gained more notice for his supporting role later that year in the women's melodrama White Oleander (2002). Though he only appeared in a few scenes, Hauser's kindly and sexy young foster dad Ray easily caught the eye of the audience as well as troubled foster teen Alison Lohman. Returning to more testosterone-friendly work, Hauser subsequently co-starred with Hart's War officer Bruce Willis in Antoine Fuqua's action thriller Man of War (2003), and got behind the nitro-charged wheel for the sequel The Fast and the Furious 2 (2003). He continued to work in little-seen fare like Paparazzi and The Cave, but did score a part as one of Vince Vaughn's brothers in the aptly titled comedy The Break-Up. Over the next several years, Hauser would remain active on screen, appearing in films like The Cave, The Break-Up, and The FAmily That Prays, as well as on TV series like K-Ville and Chase. Hauser's father is actor Wings Hauser.

Trivia: Intimidation often looms large for a legendary director's son who wishes to follow in the footsteps of his famous parent; perhaps for this reason, more than a few opt to establish themselves in another field. For Danny Huston, however -- the scion of mythically revered, Academy Award-winning filmmaker John Huston -- it wasn't at all a question of intimidation, merely one of circumstance. After pursuing directorial work fervently and dauntlessly, but encountering mixed success and frustration about his own inability to get studio backing for projects, Danny Huston found himself being drawn, one assignment at a time, into bit roles before the camera. In the process, Huston inadvertently launched himself as one of the most respected character actors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.Born May 14, 1962, in Rome, as the illegitimate child of John Huston and European actress Zoe Sallis (during the former's separation from his then-wife, the late Ricki Soma), Daniel Huston came of age in Ireland and London. He studied art and cinema as a young adult, often spending a considerable amount of time on his father's movie sets, and honed his skills in his early twenties not in the arena of directing (as might be expected), but in that of painting.Danny Huston's directorial assignments began inconspicuously, at the age of 24, with the 1987 made-for-television comic fantasies Bigfoot and Mr. Corbett's Ghost (the second of which featured John Huston in the cast). The elder Huston -- then riding on the tails of his mid-'80s comeback with Under the Volcano and Prizzi's Honor -- engineered Danny's premier A-list feature. For it, Danny signed to helm a cinematization of Thornton Wilder's picaresque fantasy novel Theophilus North, co-adapted by John Huston, Prizzi's Honor scribe Janet Roach, and James Costigan. The Hustons assembled a dream cast: Anthony Edwards, Lauren Bacall, Harry Dean Stanton, Mary Stuart Masterson, Anjelica Huston (Danny's half-sister), David Warner, and Virginia Madsen, who dated and then married Danny in the fall of 1989. Robert Mitchum replaced John Huston in a key role when he died during production. Mr. North stars Edwards as the title character, a Yale graduate who wheedles his way into the upper crust of Newport, RI, in 1926, thanks to an inherent surge of electricity in his body that enables him to relieve the ailments of locals and thus charm them irrepressibly.Unfortunately, Mr. North -- which took its stateside bows in early August 1988 -- received tepid and lackluster reviews. Perhaps for this reason, Huston found it difficult to lock down a follow-up. Within a decade, the assignments were few and far between, and he occasionally found himself directing embarrassing fare like the 1995 direct-to-video horror exploitationer The Maddening (where psychotic marrieds Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson trap a poor woman and her daughter in their home and torture them systematically), and waiting, ever so patiently, for additional projects to take shape. Huston's personal life also decrescendoed during the early '90s, given his separation and divorce from Madsen. With no other immediate options visible to him, Huston started accepting Hollywood friends' invitations to play on-camera bit roles -- and scored tremendous success in this arena to rival anything prior in his career. He debuted as a bartender in Mike Figgis' late-1995 critical smash Leaving Las Vegas, then followed it up with turns in such cause célèbres as Timecode (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Silver City (2004), and The Aviator (2004). Huston was particularly memorable as British agent Sandy Woodrow in Fernando Mereilles' The Constant Gardener (2005), and as sociopath Arthur Burns in John Hillcoat's ultraviolent Western The Proposition (2005). He would go on to appear in films like Robin Hood, Stolen, and on the series Magic City.

Trivia: Drawing on his own off-camera ethnicity and cultural heritage, actor Gil Birmingham fell into a niche in Hollywood with numerous portrayals of Native Americans, in projects that occupied a broad spectrum of genres. A large-framed but not imposing figure who carried a distinguished presence, Birmingham landed his first major role in the 1987 horror opus House 2: The Second Story (as a warrior), then ushered in additional portrayals of Native Americans in efforts including the series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and Body & Soul and the small screen miniseries Dreamkeeper (2003) and Into the West (2005). He moved into big screen features in the mid-2000s, initially by extending his Native American typecast into a portrayal of an Incan warrior from South America in the fact-based Christian missionary drama End of the Spear (2005), then joined Ben Stiller and Dick Van Dyke for the big-budget, special effects-heavy comedy Night at the Museum (2006), and signed for a supporting role in the vampiric romance Twilight (2008).

Trivia: Parents were peace/anti-nuclear activists who moved frequently while he was young. As a result, he lived in 30 different places before he turned 13. His family did not have a TV until 1984, when they purchased one to watch the Olympics. Realized he wanted to become an actor in 1987 when he was mesmerized by Michael Douglas's Oscar-winning portrayal of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Made film debut in 1993's Alive. As an up-and-coming actor, he appeared in a number of off-Broadway shows in New York, including Terrence McNally's controversial drama Corpus Christi in 1998. Made his Broadway debut in 2005 in a revival of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. Put on 43lbs. for the part of Texas Western coach Don Haskins in Glory Road (2006). In 2008, he appeared in an off-Broadway production of Fault Lines, a play directed by David Schwimmer. Portrayed a crime boss opposite James Franco in the drama William Vincent, an independent feature that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2010.

Trivia: For half a decade, actor Josh Holloway made his living with TV guest spots and supporting roles in movies most people have never heard of. But in 2004, that all changed when he landed the part of marooned conman James "Sawyer" Ford on the mindbending ABC drama Lost. Following the show's success, Holloway moved into the realm of film, appearing in movies like Stay Cool and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. In 2014, he returned to television in on the CBS series Intelligence.